Cedars-Sinai Receives $5M ARPA-H Contract to Develop AI-Powered Drug Toxicity Prediction Platform
Cedars-Sinai has been awarded a $5.05 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop KronosRx, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to predict drug toxicity with unprecedented accuracy. This initiative directly addresses a critical challenge in pharmaceutical advancement – the high failure rate of clinical trials due to adverse drug reactions (ADRs) that are frequently enough missed by customary animal models.
KronosRx represents a paradigm shift in drug safety assessment, moving beyond reliance on animal proxies to a multi-modal system integrating biological hardware and sophisticated computational software. The platform utilizes “patient avatars” – miniature, functioning human organ models created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) – alongside millions of anonymized data points from Cedars-Sinai’s extensive Electronic Health Record (EHR) network.
These organoids,including models of the heart and brain,mimic real-time human responses to experimental drugs. The resulting data is then analyzed by deep-learning AI models, enabling “dynamic” modeling that accounts for individual patient variables such as age, existing health conditions, and concurrent medications – factors often overlooked in conventional testing.
The project is led by Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, Vice Chair of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai, and brings together a team of experts in regenerative and computational medicine, including Clive Svendsen, PhD, Arun Sharma, PhD, and Graciela gonzalez-Hernandez, PhD.
Currently, over 30% of clinical trials fail due to unforeseen toxicities, resulting in ample financial losses and delays in bringing potentially life-saving therapies to patients. KronosRx aims to significantly reduce this failure rate, accelerate drug development timelines, and ultimately improve patient safety. By proactively identifying potential risks, the platform promises to navigate the “valley of death” in drug development and deliver safer, more effective treatments to those in need.
