Animal health firm Boehringer Ingelheim will partner with Lifebit Biotech to utilise artificial intelligence for the detection of global disease outbreaks.
Technology firm Lifebit’s REAL platform automatically detects and tracks animal disease outbreaks using real-world evidence and AI.
The captured insights can accelerate detection of the latest outbreaks including transboundary diseases and emerging pathogens.
Now researchers from the two organisations will work to combine real-world evidence and the latest AI algorithms to identify infectious disease outbreaks and respond accordingly.
Lifebit REAL uses advanced analytic capabilities to automatically notify users of outbreaks, such as transboundary disease spread or the emergence of pathogens such as Covid.
The system is built around an active learning architecture: with more relevant data ingested, the accuracy of the system increases.
As an example, over 500 million tweets, 3 million news articles and thousands of scientific papers are published every day.
However, with the sea of data being so vast, it is challenging for decision makers to collate meaningful insights that are both useful and actionable.
Lifebit’s system alleviates these difficulties by combining precision data harvesting techniques with proprietary cutting-edge AI algorithms to identify signals from all the data noise.
Dr Eric Haaksma, of Boehringer Ingelheim said: “External innovation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our R&D playbook.
"We are strategically partnering with Lifebit to leverage AI to monitor and interpret scientific and other sources in real-time, enabling us to track data related to animal diseases.
"This will accelerate the detection process as the vast amounts of scientific relevant information being produced at many levels cannot be feasibly collected and analysed manually.”
Dr Maria Chatzou-Dunford, CEO of Lifebit Biotech added: “We thrive at connecting both locked-up sensitive biomedical data from around the world and AI-driven automated RWE data insights.
"Companies at the cutting edge of science, like Boehringer Ingelheim, can make faster and smarter decisions - delivering insights that change lives.”
