Cambridge, UK & Montreal, CA – 02 December 2020 – BIOS Health today launched an initiative that will see them work with world leading partners to deliver a new class of treatments for some of humanity’s most pressing chronic diseases. Announced at Web Summit 2020, the BIOS Autonomic Therapy Initiative (BIOS ATI) will be the first deployment of their next generation neural interface technology for treating heart disease directly via the nervous system. 

Despite the fact that cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death worldwide, treatments have seen little improvement since the Beta blocker (which was discovered in 1964). Pharmaceutical companies are hitting a wall in developing new treatments, with over 10,000 compounds tested for each drug brought to market. Neural interfaces can be used to form a direct connection with the neurons around the heart and other organs, which offers a whole new class of treatments for cardiovascular disease. BIOS ATI will demonstrate proof of concept for such treatments in pre-clinical and clinical settings to allow for further translation & commercialisation of this state-of-the-art technology for real human impact.

BIOS’ mission is to unlock the potential of the nervous system in treating chronic disease by using AI-powered neural interfaces that can automatically read and write neural signals, initially focussing on cardiac conditions.  BIOS’ vision is that patients will have their chronic conditions managed via the nervous system directly by AI, giving personalised, real-time treatment recommendations and even replacing current drugs with computer generated neural signals.

To enable this technology, BIOS have been partnered with Nvidia since 2017 as part of their Inception programme. Nvidia’s Jetson GPUs are used to power the BIOS neural interface technology where AI is used to translate the language of the nervous system in real time and to understand the neural basis of cardiovascular disease.

Alongside announcing the initiative, BIOS today announced a panel of experts, key opinion leaders & clinicians from across the sector who will be guiding the work, including:

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• Prof Tim Denison, Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in BioEngineering at the University of Oxford

• Prof David Paterson, Head of Dept of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford

• Mona Flores MD, Global Head of Medical AI at Nvidia and practicing Cardiothoracic Surgeon

• Dr Cem Baydar, Head of Portfolio Strategy & Consulting Services at IQVIA

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Emil Hewage, CEO & Co-Founder of BIOS said: