Company Uses AI, Machine Learning to Tackle Heart Disease

Cleerly, a company creating a new standard of care for heart disease, launched with $43 million in Series B funding and unveiled its first-of-its-kind digital care pathway solution for heart attack prevention. The financing, which was led by Vensana Capital with participation from LRVHealth, New Leaf Venture Partners, DigiTx Partners, the American College of Cardiology, Cigna Ventures, and existing investors, brings Cleerly’s total funding to $54 million.
 
Cleerly was founded based on more than a decade of foundational research its team used to develop the proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms that power its revolutionary capabilities. This research was conducted in The Dalio Institute for Cardiovascular Imaging at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine and evolved into the Cleerly technologies. The research includes large-scale clinical trials with more than 50,000 patients, comprising the most extensive body of coronary imaging research to study how imaging can be used to better understand heart disease and project patient outcomes. Cleerly was founded in 2017 to translate this advanced imaging science into the company’s pioneering approach for identifying people at risk of heart attacks.
 
“Advanced imaging has been key to diagnosing and preventing the most common causes of cancer for years, but we’re not using it yet to prevent the most common cause of death. We use 3D mammograms, colonoscopies and lung CT scans to find and prevent breast, colon and lung cancer, but we haven’t had similar capabilities for the world’s number one killer—heart disease,” said James K. Min, M.D. FACC, founder and CEO of Cleerly. “Through the application of artificial intelligence that is constantly being refined with our unprecedented volume of accruing and exclusive clinical data, Cleerly is finally bringing heart disease diagnosis and prevention into the 21st century.”
 
Heart attacks are a public health epidemic, accounting for one in every four deaths. However, the causes of heart attacks have been poorly understood and difficult to identify. For example, measuring cholesterol is widely relied upon as an indicator of risk, but there is more than 80 percent overlap of cholesterol levels for those who will, versus those who will not experience heart attacks. Further, the first symptom of heart disease in more than 50 percent of individuals diagnosed with coronary artery disease is a heart attack or death.
 
A Pioneering Approach for Preventing Heart Disease
Cleerly’s digital care pathway leverages non-invasive coronary computed tomography (CT) angiography to perform comprehensive coronary artery phenotyping through AI-enabled and U.S. Food and Drug Administration-cleared solutions. This technology is based on millions of annotated lab images used to build more than two dozen proprietary algorithms capable of quantifying and characterizing the presence, extent, severity and type of coronary artery disease and other cardiovascular disorders.
 
Through this new visibility and understanding of coronary artery disease, Cleerly is transforming the field of cardiovascular medicine by introducing a multidimensional approach to serve each and every stakeholder in the care pathway—from imaging physicians, to clinicians, to patients, to payers.

“We see Cleerly as the future of how coronary artery disease will be evaluated, and we support the company’s mission to tailor a personalized approach to diagnosis, management and treatment, and to validate all of this with world-class clinical evidence of utility and cost-effectiveness” said Justin Klein, M.D., JD, managing partner at Vensana Capital. “With Cleerly’s industry-leading technology platform and inherent value propositions, we believe Cleerly is ideally positioned to inform a new standard of care for how we manage coronary artery disease at scale.”
 
For example, beyond end-to-end AI for deep coronary phenotyping, Cleerly’s solutions include tools for clinicians—such as primary care physicians or general cardiologists—to understand the importance of the data without having to understand advanced imaging. It also includes interactive and personalized, patient-facing tools to help improve health literacy and empower patients with knowledge. Finally, quantitative tools enable patients and their care team to track coronary artery disease changes over time.
 
With its Series B funding, Cleerly will scale its commercial reach, expand operational capabilities and strategic partnerships, and continue to grow its focus on industry-leading research and development. As part of the financing, Klein of Vensana Capital, Tripp Peake of LRVHealth, and Vijay Lathi of New Leaf Venture Partners will join Cleerly’s Board of Directors.
 
“We are proud to be the partner of choice for companies like Cleerly who share our commitment in breaking boundaries and accelerating innovation to unlock bold, new opportunities that create better health for the people we serve,” said Tom Richards, global lead, strategy and business development at Cigna. “With these digital health partnerships and through our end-to-end care approach, we see significant opportunity to accelerate innovation in cardiovascular disease while improving patient experience, reducing costs and improving outcomes.”
 
Through value-based precision diagnostic solutions driven by machine intelligence, Cleerly enables comprehensive phenotyping of coronary artery disease, as determined from advanced non-invasive CT imaging. Headquartered in New York City, Cleerly enhances health literacy for each and every stakeholder in the coronary care pathway.