Clinical AI company Sensyne Health has signed a five year non-exclusive Strategic Research Agreement (SRA) with Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH) to improve research into rare and complex childhood diseases.
Sensyne will analyse anonymised patient data using clinical artificial intelligence (AI) technology with the goal of improving paediatric clinical outcomes, and accelerate research into new medicines to find new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases. Through the SRA, Sensyne will gain access to de-identified and anonymised patient data which covers approximately 320,000 people.
The first project between Sensyne Health and GOSH will focus on developing a clinical decision support algorithm to help clinicians caring for children with chronic kidney disease. This will then be used to develop further clinical support algorithms for other diseases in children.
Under the SRA, Sensyne and GOSH will focus on three areas:
- Paediatric drug discovery – helping to discover new medicines aimed at treating childhood diseases.
- Clinical decision support tools to support children’s care – developing and validating the effectiveness of new AI enabled software tools to help clinicians analyse complex data sets so as to improve clinical decision-making. The AI algorithms will be developed to create early warning systems that identify children most at risk, and potentially allow earlier interventions, to help monitor how a child is responding to a particular treatment.
- Clinical trial design – use of AI for the analysis of retrospective clinical data and the generation of synthetic control arms to support clinical trials more effectively, speeding up drug development for children.
Creation of the first global paediatric AI research community
GOSH says it has invested significantly in creating a unique dataset with the aim to drive forward improvements in diagnosis and treatment of rare and complex childhood diseases. Furthermore, GOSH, together with Sensyne, plans to build a global ethical AI research paediatric community, dedicated to using data to find new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases.
The idea is that having a global AI research paediatric community will help enable pharmaceutical companies to invest in new therapies for children. Developments in AI alongside the use of real-world data provides an opportunity to develop new medicines and to accelerate the clinical development of new medicines for childhood illnesses.
Matthew Shaw, chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: “At GOSH we treat patients with the most rare and complex conditions. Research into developing new diagnosis and treatments is vital and we are always looking to find ways to improve patient outcomes, while making sure their information is safe and secure. Children are at the heart of everything we do and this collaboration is no different. It will offer the potential to use digital innovation to find and develop diagnosis and treatments much faster, not just for GOSH patients but children across the country and internationally.”
Lord Paul Drayson, CEO of Sensyne Health, said: “We are delighted to be undertaking research in partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital, widely recognised as one of the leading centres for children’s healthcare and research in the world. GOSH has invested heavily in its digital infrastructure and curation of its data which means we can start work immediately: together we aim to use the power of ethical AI to make a real difference in finding new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases and in future to develop a world-wide research community using ethical AI to improve the lives of children world-wide.”