Using our Geneticure platform, our team of scientists has developed a COVID19 solution, potentially creating an important short-term advance until a vaccine. One of the most common co-morbidities in patients who develop severe illness is hypertension, an area where we have profound expertise in the genetics of the disease and treatment response. Like in hypertension treatment, we have identified genetic influences within the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) that we believe will be beneficial in predicting the severity of, and guiding treatment for, COVID19 patients. Many companies and academics are tackling this from various angles leaning on their expertise to help save lives and preserve resources, we hope to do the same. Here’s how: COVID-19, like other coronaviruses, bind to and utilize, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as a host receptor in order to infect cells resulting in respiratory illness in humans. This is the lock-and-key allowing entry into the cells. As we all have learned, some can carry and transmit the virus without any symptoms, some with mild symptoms, and some with severe enough complications resulting in death. Hypertension can cause changes in the RAAS (as an important counter-regulatory pathway to balance increases in blood pressure) and common blood pressure medications have shown to modulate ACE2 levels in small trials. Several other clinical comorbidities and demographic variables including diabetes, age, and sex have been shown to cause changes in the RAAS in animal models: these are all associated with differences in COVID-19 presentation. Using the data that are available from these patients with varying levels of severity, it is clear that differences in endogenous ACE2 levels may alter the risk of disease transmission along with the degree of severity of disease progression. Not all hypertensives, diabetics, or men develop COVID-19, and many without these factors ultimately develop COVID-19 at varying degrees of severity, suggesting genetics may be one of many factors that is important. Interestingly, there are important potential differences in the importance of ACE2 pre-vs. post-infection. With high ACE2 levels likely being protective for the heart and lungs post-infection. Given this complex relationship: further study is certainly warranted. With our cheek-swab test, we can identify patients who likely have low vs. high ACE2 levels, based on genetic variants important in the RAAS, to triage their risk for disease progression. We are beginning clinical research trials on this. We can also utilize this genetic information to suggest common medication adjustments that can be utilized to reduce ACE2 concentrations, hopefully improving outcomes and saving lives.

Geneticure’s tests predict response to drug and device therapy for chronic and dangerous diseases. This shortens and optimizes the path to wellness. In hypertension, Geneticure demonstrated the ability to control 97% of patients within 6 months, with 36% lower blood pressure vs. standard of care: saving $1300 per patient per year - as evidenced in 3 clinical studies and 5 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

BenevolentAI, founded in 2013, is an advanced technology company focused on accelerating the journey from data to medicines. It is the world’s only technology company with end-to-end capability from early discovery to late stage clinical development. The company is HQ’d in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK) and further offices in New York and Belgium. BenevolentAI has active R&D drug programmes from discovery to PhaseIIb in disease areas such as ALS, Parkinson’s, Glioblastoma and Sarcopenia The company seeks to improve patient’s lives by applying technology designed to lower drug development costs, decrease failure rates and increasing the speed at which medicines are generated. BenevolentAI’s approach to this is to integrate technology across the entire medicinal R&D process (rather than fragments of it) and by doing so solve fundamental innovation roadblocks such as the ability to ingest large data sets, meaningful reasoning on those data sets, validation of ideas from those data sets and the rapid experimentation of those ideas. In order to do this Benevolent AI has created a very large rich bioscience specific knowledge graph which unifies unstructured and structured data. This is then used by the ‘Benevolent Platform’ - a totally unique end-to-end computational and experimental platform. The Benevolent Platform ingests data, reads, understands and contextualises data to determine the cause of a disease, proposes a drug target, makes a molecule to treat that disease and then defines the right patients to test that molecule in to drive greater clinical success. This approach enables the company to make infinitely more deductions and inferences across disparate, complex data sources, identifying and creating relationships, trends and patterns, that would be impossible for a human being to make alone. However, the Benevolent Platform does not not replace the need for scientists but instead augments them – providing access to the full breadth of knowledge and the connections within it, in order to close the gap between data and drugs, evolve ideas and drive superior repeatable science to run disease programmes at scale in a faster more successful way.

BenevolentAI, founded in 2013, is an advanced technology company focused on accelerating the journey from data to medicines. It is the world’s only technology company with end-to-end capability from early discovery to late stage clinical development. The company is HQ’d in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK) and further offices in New York and Belgium. BenevolentAI has active R&D drug programmes from discovery to PhaseIIb in disease areas such as ALS, Parkinson’s, Glioblastoma and Sarcopenia The company seeks to improve patient’s lives by applying technology designed to lower drug development costs, decrease failure rates and increasing the speed at which medicines are generated. BenevolentAI’s approach to this is to integrate technology across the entire medicinal R&D process (rather than fragments of it) and by doing so solve fundamental innovation roadblocks such as the ability to ingest large data sets, meaningful reasoning on those data sets, validation of ideas from those data sets and the rapid experimentation of those ideas. In order to do this Benevolent AI has created a very large rich bioscience specific knowledge graph which unifies unstructured and structured data. This is then used by the ‘Benevolent Platform’ - a totally unique end-to-end computational and experimental platform. The Benevolent Platform ingests data, reads, understands and contextualises data to determine the cause of a disease, proposes a drug target, makes a molecule to treat that disease and then defines the right patients to test that molecule in to drive greater clinical success. This approach enables the company to make infinitely more deductions and inferences across disparate, complex data sources, identifying and creating relationships, trends and patterns, that would be impossible for a human being to make alone. However, the Benevolent Platform does not not replace the need for scientists but instead augments them – providing access to the full breadth of knowledge and the connections within it, in order to close the gap between data and drugs, evolve ideas and drive superior repeatable science to run disease programmes at scale in a faster more successful way.