ZephyrAI CEO Grant Verstandig
ZephyrAI
When Grant Verstandig founded Rally Health in 2010, he says that digital health wasn’t really a trend. But fast forward nearly a dozen years later, not only is the digital health sector quickly growing, there’s a lot of companies promising to use artificial intelligence technology to improve care as well. But Verstandig has found that a lot of it still seems to be hype.
“The healthcare space is riddled with ‘AI for this’ and ‘AI for that’,” says Verstandig, cofounder and CEO of the company. “We wanted to take a different approach.”
With that in mind, Verstandig cofounded his new venture, ZephyrAI, with Yisroel Brumer and Jeff Sherman in 2020. On Monday, the company came out of stealth and announced its board of directors, which includes Celgene cofounder Sol Barer, former Aetna CEO Jack Rowe, MedStar Health president and CEO Ken Samet and Lerner vice president Michael Cohen. The company currently has 30 employees and is currently working with different pharmaceutical companies, payers and providers.
One thing that Verstandig says is different about his new company is that it didn’t start trying to develop proprietary datasets to use with its algorithms. Instead, it tested its AI technology with publicly available data to start, to see if it could develop new insights. The company’s first discovery was the potential for antibiotic azithromycin for potential use as a lung cancer treatment, which was published in the journal Oncogene in May.
Over the course of the past year, Verstandig says that his company’s identified around a hundred novel drug targets as well as several dozen potential ways to repurpose existing drugs. Zephyr primarily plans to work with pharmaceutical companies for developing them but doesn’t rule out the possibility it may work on a drug itself.
In addition to drug discovery, ZephyrAI also intends to improve healthcare outcomes by looking at both patient characteristics and pharmaceutical interactions to accelerate personalized medicine. “Using tech we’ll find the right drug for the right person at the right time,” he says. “For example, maybe someone is taking 6 drugs but they only need 3.”
The company aims to accomplish this by working with payers, providers and pharmaceutical companies to combine datasets and produce better insights that can improve outcomes. ZephyrAI is already working with several different companies in this regard, according to Verstandig. “We’re taking a sledgehammer to the silos,” he says.
In the short term, ZephyrAI’s business model will come from licensing its technology, but long term the company …….
