Century Health and Tessel Biosciences Partner to Leverage AI-Curated Real-World Data for COPD Drug Development
Key Insights
Century Health (search) and Tessel Biosciences (search) announced a collaboration to apply AI-curated real-world COPD (search) data to advance early drug development for muco-obstructive lung disease (search).
The partnership aims to identify and characterize underserved COPD (search) patient subgroups, particularly those with mucus obstruction or non-Type 2 inflammation (search) who are least responsive to current therapies.
Tessel will leverage Century Health (search)'s AI-powered platform to rapidly assess disease characteristics and match therapeutic hypotheses with patients most likely to respond.
Century Health (search), a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence to real-world clinical data, and Tessel Biosciences (search), a biotechnology company combining human organoids and machine learning to model chronic disease, announced a collaboration to advance early drug development for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD (search)). The partnership will leverage Century Health's AI-curated COPD real-world dataset to characterize key patient subgroups that could benefit from Tessel's programs in development for muco-obstructive lung disease (search).
Addressing Unmet Medical Needs in COPD
COPD (search) represents a major global health burden, causing 3.5 million deaths in 2021 and affecting hundreds of millions worldwide. Despite decades of research, several COPD subtypes remain poorly understood in real-world care settings, particularly patient groups with features such as mucus obstruction or non-Type 2 inflammation (search). These patient populations are often the least responsive to current COPD therapies, highlighting significant unmet medical needs.
"This partnership illustrates how AI-curated real-world data can meaningfully inform early drug development. The data we need for much of this advancement already exists in electronic records," said Vish Srivastava, Co-Founder & CEO at Century Health (search). "Century Health's data abstraction helps Tessel better and more quickly understand patient subgroups that may be most relevant for targeted therapies."
AI-Powered Data Analysis Platform
Century Health (search)'s AI-powered model identifies and translates complex data often hidden in electronic health records and unstructured clinical notes from community specialty practices. This technology can identify COPD (search) variables that claims data alone cannot capture, enabling researchers to rapidly assess disease characteristics including mucus-obstructive features, airway-dominant patterns, emphysema (search), and chronic bronchitis (search).
The platform offers a more immediate and adaptable alternative to traditional registries, which can take years to build before they can be used for clinical research. Because the data is taken directly from routine clinical documentation, it provides real-time insights into how patient subgroups respond to current standard of care treatments.
Tessel's Precision Medicine Approach
Tessel's research focuses on repairing damaged airways in patients historically underserved by existing therapies, including those who don't respond to inhaled regimens or biologics targeting Type 2 inflammation (search). The company's target discovery platform, Tesselogic, deduces how to make diseased organs work more like healthy ones based on measurements in patient-derived cells that mimic clinical endpoints.
"Working with Century Health (search) to bring real-world evidence into early-stage drug development will help Tessel make more informed decisions as we advance our drug candidates for lung disease," said Naren Tallapragada, PhD, CEO & Co-Founder of Tessel Biosciences (search). "We want to understand how unmet need in the real world compares to reports from clinical trials and academic medical centers."
Through iterative rounds of AI-guided perturbation, Tesselogic efficiently identifies promising drug targets. By leveraging real-world data, Tessel can more precisely match these therapeutic hypotheses with patients who are most likely to respond, supporting the development of precision medicine approaches in COPD (search).
Strategic Implications and Future Development
The collaboration enables Tessel to refine its development strategy and focus on patient groups where new mechanisms of action may have the greatest clinical impact. Century Health (search)'s disease-specific, specialty practice data provides detailed insights into how underserved patient subgroups respond to current treatments, informing the design of more targeted therapeutic interventions.
This partnership builds on Tessel's growing momentum, including a recent award of up to $4.2 million from ARPA-H (search) in support of its work combining organoids and AI to simulate human biology. The company is developing novel therapies for chronic inflammatory airway diseases (search) with a focus on mucus obstruction, positioning it to address significant gaps in current COPD (search) treatment options.