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Artificial intelligence-enabled real-world evidence platform Century Health is collaborating with the director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine to create an AI-enabled clinical research database focused on steatotic liver disease.
SLD, often called fatty liver, is a condition in which there is an accumulation of more than 5% excess fat in the liver. The term includes several conditions, including Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease (MASLD), Alcohol-Related Liver Disease (ALD) and a combination of both (MetALD).
Steatotic liver disease is primarily caused by metabolic syndrome, including obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high triglycerides.
The database the partners are creating will be powered by Century Health's AI-enabled platform and developed under Virginia Commonwealth University's (VCU's) institutional oversight.
Century Health's technology will extract structured and unstructured data from electronic health records to enable the analysis of real-world disease trajectories.
The partners said the database will allow analyses across tens of thousands of records and will include disease characterization, patterns of progression and clinical outcomes aligned with what researchers consider most important.
The database will initially focus on fibrosis, noninvasive biomarkers, patterns of alcohol exposure and major clinical outcomes, but will expand over time as more variables and research questions are introduced.
The partners said the tool is intended to be used as a resource for clinical and translational research.
"By combining longitudinal clinical data with advanced analytics, our work with Century Health will create a powerful foundation for understanding disease progression at scale and for addressing some of the most important unanswered questions in SLD research," Dr. Juan Pablo Arab, director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health, said in a statement.
THE LARGER TREND
Last month, Century Health announced a partnership with Texas-based Dallas Renal Group to leverage its AI platform to improve the identification and understanding of rare glomerular diseases, including IgA nephropathy (IgAN) and C3 glomerulopathy.
In December, Century partnered with biotech company Tessel Biosciences, which combines machine learning and human organoids to model chronic disease. Tessel would leverage Century's COPD dataset to characterize patient subgroups that could benefit from Tessel's muco-obstructive lung disease programs.
A month earlier, the company partnered with the neurocognitive disease care company Memory Treatment Centers to convert unstructured clinical data into research-grade real-world evidence to understand disease progression and how therapies for Alzheimer's disease perform outside clinical trials.
Century Health has also formed partnerships with Balboa Nephrology to make data usable for clinical research and drug development in chronic kidney disease; with Nimbus Health to develop datasets for serious respiratory diseases; and with Nira Medical to curate data from more than 3,000 patients with multiple sclerosis to understand the disease and treatment outcomes.
Century Health launched in 2024 with $2 million in pre-seed funding.
