BIOS Health nets $1.4m for Canadian AI neuro-cardiology collaboration
BIOS Health has secured $1.4million of new funding to extend its Canadian neuro-cardiology collaboration with Mila, McGill University and the Université de Montréal to develop an AI-controlled closed-loop neuromodulation system for chronic cardiac conditions.
The funding is from MEDTEQ+ (the Pan-Canadian Consortium for Industrial Research and Innovation in Medical Technology), with the support of the Ministry of Economy and Innovation of Quebec (MEI), Mitacs Accelerate, and the Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives programme at McGill University.
The original partnership, for which BIOS received $620,000, began when the Hills Road-based company initiated the research in 2020. Today, the new $1.4m project will build on existing collaborative work and go further in the research into neuro-cardiac control.
Emil Hewage, BIOS Health CEO, said: “This new funding is further validation of the great results and progress we’ve been making in our ATI programme. We have a talented team of neuroscientists and engineers, and we’re really looking forward to the next stage – which will take us right up to the point of clinical trials in humans.”
The BIOS team will continue to collaborate with Dr Blake Richards, assistant professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University, and Dr Guillaume Lajoie, assistant professor, applied mathematics, Université de Montréal. The aim is to use AI to preferentially modulate cardiac function while reducing side effects on other organs, culminating in a technology that improves patient outcomes in a clinical setting.
Dr Lajoie said: “Our growing understanding of the link between neural and bio-markers makes it abundantly clear that the future of many clinical interventions will include neural interfacing. This will enable patients to receive second-by-second personalised treatments – informed by the interactions between neural and physiological activity – eg heart rate – decoded by machine learning. The outcome will be higher response rates, fewer side effects compared to pharmaceutical interventions, and more targeted treatments for patients.”
The partnership with Mila will work to optimise the system to decode and encode the signals from the brain to the body, so patients will have their chronic conditions managed via the nervous system directly by AI – replacing drugs and changing the lives of millions of people.
Dr Richards added: “We’re pushing the frontier by using machine learning to identify subtle relationships between cardiac activity and the signals that travel between the brain and the body.”
