Health Capital Helsinki
  • Home
  • Why Helsinki Metropolitan
  • About
  • News
  • Events
  • Opportunities
  • Careers
  • Contact
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
DataSolu
Oct 26, 2021

Presenting Health Incubator Helsinki batch 2 companies:

DataSolu takes on CV diseases armed with lab-grown cardiomyocytes and AI

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, estimated to cause 17.3 million deaths every year. Furthermore, there is an expected increase of up to 23.6 million deaths by the year 2030, representing 31% of all global deaths. In fighting CV diseases, new innovations are direly needed. Let’s meet Finnish DataSolu team, developing their promising innovation in the Health Incubator Helsinki program that started in the spring of 2021.

DataSolu wants to speed up preclinical drug development and boost preventive care by revealing and predicting potential heart failures, using a unique cocktail of lab-grown cardiomyocytes, biomimicry and AI.

“Regular screening methods like ECG, exercise stress tests and blood tests may not pick up the very small abnormalities and hidden heart diseases. We want to be the trusted partner that finds even the slightest anomalies accurately,” says Dr. Mika Aho from DataSolu.

DataSolu applications are in cardiac toxicity screening and preventive care. Cardiotoxicity is the main reason for drug withdrawal, and most of the new compounds fail during the late-phase development.

“There are opportunities for reducing the costs and time-to-market significantly in pharmaceutics, but also in chemical and cosmetology companies,” Aho continues.

From the outside, DataSolu service is very straightforward. Pharma companies and CROs send or stream their data to the platform, and in return get back the analysis.

“Why would you use a biologist’s or cardiologist’s valuable time to manually analyze hours of data to detect arrhythmias and classify potential heart diseases, if there are better options?” Aho asks.

Mika Aho and Leo Heinsuo from DataSolu
DataSolu

Mika Aho (left) and Leo Heinsuo from DataSolu.

Why would you use a biologist’s or cardiologist’s valuable time to manually analyze hours of data to detect arrhythmias and classify potential heart diseases, if there are better options?

Enter: iPSCs!

At the heart of DataSolu innovation, we find the induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), reprogrammed from adult human cells and differentiated into cardiomyocytes. iPSCs are a promising alternative to model human cardiac diseases: they display properties similar to human heart cells, and have the advantage of mass production in the laboratory, having multiple disease-specific and patient-specific lines.

“In addition, they offer the opportunity to study cells that are genetically matched to individual patients with disease, and help overcome the problems associated with animal models. In fact, the European parliament just recently voted in favor of a plan to replace animal experiments with cutting-edge science,” Aho explains.

DataSolu

Meet the MEAs and physiological stimulation

The analysis method deploys microelectrode arrays (MEAs) which are, basically, glass chips printed with multiple microelectrodes, allowing non-invasive long-term measurement of electrically active cells cultured on them. MEAs have been increasingly used iPSC in research for disease modeling, drug testing and screening for early in vitro detection of proarrhythmia risk before clinical use – safe non-arrythmic drugs do not induce arrhythmias.

However, sometimes the anomalies and drug effects are not visible in the data. Research has demonstrated that mimicking human physiology on a dish is an effective stimulus for cardiovascular studies. Which, first of all, mimics the real human physiology, but also stimulates the cells in different conditions, e.g. under physical exertion.

“Physiological stimulation provides us with more valuable data about human response to stress, insight into disease susceptibility, and potentially to understanding individualized treatment response in the future as well,” says Aho.

“Once we have enough data, we can propose which drugs are the best fit for the individual patients,” he adds.

DataSolu’s ultimate goal is to build a rich iPSC data asset, which in the future will enable, for example, rapid personalized drug development and safety testing of new chemicals.

Building the data vault: Data in, analysis out

Using MEA, cardiomyocytes can be monitored during drug testing over longer periods of time.

“MEA devices generate massive amounts of time-series data to feed our deep learning algorithms. We pre-process it, keep the most relevant data and results safe,” says Leo Heinsuo from DataSolu.

DataSolu solution focuses on end-to-end deep learning, omitting traditional feature engineering methods.

“We’ve experimented with countless different types of modern deep learning architectures to tackle the challenge of highly variable iPSC recordings. Unlike ECG waveforms, the field potential (FP) of iPSCs can have very different shapes for each individual recording. The shapes may or may not tell something about an underlying disease or condition,” Heinsuo continues.

DataSolu has been data and AI-driven from the beginning. The company’s ultimate goal is to build a rich iPSC data asset, which in the future will enable, for example, rapid personalized drug development and safety testing of new chemicals.

“Eventually data is the most valuable asset. When you’re utilizing massive amounts of data properly, there is huge business potential involved,” Aho envisions.

Finding that commercial sweet spot

Still, technically speaking, DataSolu is not yet a registered company.

“We haven’t officially established the company yet, but we have been gradually building up the technologies, formed the core team and advisory group,” Aho explains.

DataSolu is one of the participants of Health Incubator Helsinki’s 2021 program.

“Our involvement with the program has been eye-opening. With many paths to choose from, the incubator is helping us find our sweet spot commercially,” Aho says.

“While we are now focusing on the data analysis, in the long run we also might want to generate the data ourselves. So far, we have been self-financed, but doing the cardiotoxicity testing ourselves even on a smaller scale is costly, and thus we are looking for potential partners and investors to take the next big step.”

DataSolu logo

Fast Facts

Name: DataSolu

Product:Speeding up preclinical drug development by revealing and predicting hidden heart diseases and failures

Founded: Not officially registered yet

Team size: 5

Target customer/market:Big Pharma, CROs, people with risk of heart disease

Check out all the companies in the Health Incubator Helsinki program

Text: Sami J. Anteroinen

Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn

More case stories

Health Capital Helsinki

Lumoral device and batteryKoite Health

Brushing your teeth is not enough – Finnish innovation reduces gingivitis efficiently

Nov 23, 2022
https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Lumoral-laite-ja-akku-copy-res72.jpg 883 1335 taruvirtanen https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/hch_logo_horizontal_black-300x165-1.png taruvirtanen2022-11-23 14:04:292022-11-24 10:15:13Brushing your teeth is not enough – Finnish innovation reduces gingivitis efficiently
Design model of a wrist device to curb alcohol cravingsJuliana Harkki

Skin-stroking device to help curb alcohol cravings developed in Finland

https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/hentoTouch_ranne_v2_w1000.jpg 736 1000 taruvirtanen https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/hch_logo_horizontal_black-300x165-1.png taruvirtanen2022-11-14 16:13:032022-11-14 16:13:25Skin-stroking device to help curb alcohol cravings developed in Finland
Mobile phone and Olo wellness appNature Solutions

Finnish startup Olo delivers the perfect sonic recharge

Sep 14, 2022
https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Olo-app-1500x1000-1.jpg 1000 1500 taruvirtanen https://healthcapitalhelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/hch_logo_horizontal_black-300x165-1.png taruvirtanen2022-09-14 08:00:462022-09-15 13:30:51Finnish startup Olo delivers the perfect sonic recharge
News

Health Capital Helsinki

Helsinki Partners
Kasarmikatu 36
00130 HELSINKI
FINLAND

Privacy notice

Sign up to our newsletter

Subscribe

Follow us

  • twitter
  • linkedin
Health Capital Helsinki
Scroll to top

We use cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

Find out more and set your preferences settings.

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
How we use cookies

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

Essential website cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are necessary to deliver the website as intended, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You can always block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will prompt you to accept or refuse cookies every time you revisit our site.

We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Third party cookies

This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We also use Twitter's and LinkedIn's cookies to help us improve our content and reach.

Please enable essential website cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

Privacy notice

You can read about how we use your data on our Privacy notice page.

Privacy notice