Century Health and Tessel Biosciences Collaborate to Apply AI-Curated Real World Data to Advance Early Drug Development in COPD

• Despite decades of research, many COPD subpopulations remain poorly understood in real-world settings and underserved by existing therapies
  
  
• Using AI to assemble real-world COPD data can help to identify specific clinical traits faster and with greater accuracy than traditional data sources
  
  
• This collaboration supports Tessel's drug development strategy by helping pinpoint patient populations that can benefit from its programs

NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Century Health, a pioneer in applying AI to real-world clinical data to accelerate research, and Tessel Biosciences, a biotechnology company that combines human organoids and machine learning to model chronic disease, today announced a collaboration through which Tessel will leverage Century Health's COPD real-world dataset to characterize key patient subgroups that can benefit from its programs in development for muco-obstructive lung disease.

COPD is a major global cause of death and disability, causing 3.5 million deaths in 2021 and affecting hundreds of millions worldwide. Although the disease has been studied for decades, several subtypes are not fully understood in real-world care, particularly patient groups with features such as mucus obstruction or non-Type 2 inflammation. These groups are often the least responsive to current COPD therapies, underscoring the need for additional data on how their disease responds in clinical practice.

Century Health's AI-powered model is able to identify and translate complex data often hidden in electronic health records and unstructured clinical notes from community specialty practices to identify COPD variables that claims data alone cannot capture. This level of analysis will allow Tessel researchers to rapidly assess disease characteristics such as mucus-obstructive features, airway-dominant patterns, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis, and apply these insights to their drug development work.

In the context of lung disease, Tessel's research focuses on repairing damaged airways in patients who are historically underserved by existing therapies, including patients who don't respond to inhaled regimens or biologics that target Type 2 inflammation. Century Health's disease-specific, specialty practice data provides Tessel a detailed view of how these patient subgroups respond to the current standard of care. Because the data is taken directly from routine clinical documentation, it offers a more immediate and adaptable alternative to traditional registries, which can take years to build before they can be used for clinical research.

"This partnership illustrates how AI-curated real-world data can meaningfully inform early drug development. The data we need for much of this advancement already exists in electronic records," said Vish Srivastava, Co-Founder & CEO at Century Health. "Century Health's data abstraction helps Tessel better and more quickly understand patient subgroups that may be most relevant for targeted therapies."

The collaboration aligns with Tessel's mission to increase the predictive validity of drug development by incorporating human cells, human data, and functional phenotypes into the discovery process. The company's target discovery platform, Tesselogic, deduces how to make diseased organs work more like healthy ones, based on measurements in patient-derived cells that mimic clinical endpoints. Through iterative rounds of AI-guided perturbation, Tesselogic efficiently identifies promising drug targets. Now, by leveraging real-world data, Tessel can more precisely match these therapeutic hypotheses with patients who are most likely to respond.

"Working with Century Health to bring real-world evidence into early-stage drug development will help Tessel make more informed decisions as we advance our drug candidates for lung disease," said Naren Tallapragada, PhD, CEO & Co-Founder of Tessel Biosciences. "We want to understand how unmet need in the real world compares to reports from clinical trials and academic medical centers. Using AI to curate and abstract variables at scale will unlock insights hidden in health records, and lay the groundwork for precision medicine in COPD, while saving our scientists time."

Tessel is developing novel therapies for chronic inflammatory airway diseases, with a focus on mucus obstruction, as in COPD. By pairing its therapeutic programs with real-world data from Century Health, Tessel can refine its development strategy and focus on patient groups where new mechanisms of action may have the greatest clinical impact.

The collaboration with Century Health builds on Tessel's growing momentum, including a recent award of up to $4.2 million from ARPA-H in support of its work combining organoids and AI to simulate human biology.

About Tessel Biosciences
Tessel Biosciences builds virtual tissues to design real drugs. Tessel predicts what drugs do in people by simulating their effects on the function of human patient-derived cells. Through amphibious work at the intersection of tissue biology and AI, Tessel enables the design of better therapeutics – starting with its own pipeline of drugs for lung disease and beyond. For more information, visit www.tessel.bio.

About Century Health
Century Health is a health technology company transforming how real-world evidence is generated from clinical data. With its AI-powered platform, Century Health unlocks rich, high-quality datasets from fragmented and siloed clinical information to fuel groundbreaking research and industry collaborations. By automating data curation and enrichment, the platform eliminates manual data entry while upholding the highest standards of patient privacy. Partnering with leading academic institutions, healthcare providers, and life sciences organizations, Century Health accelerates breakthrough treatments with the power of AI. For more information, visit www.century.health.

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SOURCE Century Health