World's largest AI-powered medical research network launched by OWKIN

OWKIN today announced the world’s largest AI-powered medical research network. The OWKIN Loop Network is comprised of more than 30 prestigious hospitals and research institutions across the US and Europe. The network enables researchers to train predictive models on real-world data at scale and transfer knowledge to a collective intelligence, benefitting fellow researchers, partner hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies in order to improve patient treatment and accelerate drug R&D.

Founded in 2016, OWKIN builds machine learning technologies to enable medical and scientific discoveries. These algorithms accelerate drug development by predicting toxicity, resistance and sensitivity to treatment outcomes, and disease evolution. Researchers on the OWKIN platform are empowered to train predictive models on historically siloed, real-world medical data. OWKIN Loop is the first at-scale solution of federated learning for the healthcare industry, allowing researchers to extract insights, preserve patient privacy, and contribute to better patient outcomes.

“Access to patient data is critical for improving medical research,” said Thomas Clozel, M.D., co-founder and CEO of OWKIN. “But the current patient data brokerage system hinders knowledge-sharing and risks patient data privacy, resulting in knowledge silos at individual hospitals. We founded OWKIN to efficiently and intelligently transform hospital-level clinical data into predictive models. If we can transform the world’s clinical data into broadly accessible research knowledge, we believe we can fundamentally advance medical research and have an incredibly powerful impact on solving the most important medical challenges.”

The OWKIN Loop Network creates a partner ecosystem for sharing collective knowledge across research organizations and pharmaceutical companies seeking to advance R&D in oncology, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases. Partners within the OWKIN Loop Network include more than 30 leading international institutions, connecting hundreds of doctors and researchers. Projects include the training of a predictive model that identified a combination of new quantitative biomarkers associated with prognosis in a rare cancer, the prediction of brain age from MRI, and the prediction of gene expression profiles from whole slide images as a marker of response to immunotherapy.

"We are excited to be working with OWKIN to apply AI algorithms to clinical data for mesothelioma research," said Françoise Galateau-Sallé, M.D., principal investigator at Centre Léon Bérard. "AI models identified a new subgroup of patients that are poor responders to the standard of care and potential good candidates for immunotherapy."

The OWKIN Loop announcement comes on the heels of significant momentum for OWKIN in 2018, including the close of a $16 million Series A funding round, led by Otium Venture and joined by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Cathay Innovation, and NJF Capital. OWKIN also recently appointed Michael Pressigout, the former CIO of the Pasteur Institute, as Executive Vice President of Global Solutions.

Source: https://owkin.com/