ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Both Cleerly and Bunkerhill Health are in the business of identifying patients with risky heart disease. Their new partnership helps them reach more patients who don’t know they’re at risk of a heart attack so they can be appropriately treated.
Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the US for the past century, according to a 2024 report from the American Heart Association. Yet 50-70% of people who suffer a heart attack weren’t being treated appropriately because their risk was unrecognized. Finding those headed toward cardiac danger so they can be treated in time to avoid unwanted consequences is the founding mission of both Cleerly and Bunkerhill Health, which are developing ways of detecting and analyzing an individual’s coronary plaque, so clinicians don’t have to rely solely on surrogates of disease such as blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, comorbidities, or family history. Now, a recently announced collaboration between the two companies advances them toward their goal.
Bunkerhill Health offers the first FDA-cleared AI solution for detecting and quantifying calcified coronary plaque in routine, non-gated chest CT scans performed for other purposes, for example, the diagnosis of lung cancer or pneumonia. The company, which is backed by funding from Sequoia, Felicis, SVAngel, Optum Ventures, Y Combinator, DCVC, and Pacific 8 Ventures, was co-founded in 2018 by Nishith Khandwala, who had developed AI algorithms for healthcare applications while earning his master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University.
