GE Healthcare partners with Vanderbilt University to create AI apps
US-based medical technology company GE Healthcare has entered into a five-year partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center to develop cancer immunotherapies using artificial intelligence (AI).
Announced on January 6 by GE Healthcare, the partnership will develop multiple diagnostic tools to help predict the efficacy of an immunotherapy treatment and its effects for a specific patient before the therapy is administered.
According to GE Healthcare, patients who are currently receiving immunotherapy may not respond well to treatment and could experience severe side effects such as infections and inflammation of the internal organs. This is because it is difficult to know which patient will respond well to or reject a given treatment.
This also affects clinical trials. When patients who are not the right match for specific treatments are recruited to participate in clinical trials, it can slow down the approval of new therapies.
Ben Ho Park, marketing director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which is based in the US, said the partnership will address this hurdle in an effort to make immunotherapy more mainstream.
“We don’t want to give a therapy that has a high likelihood of doing more harm than good. This is a big problem in immunotherapies. We’re relying on very primitive tools right now,” he added.
Park said he hopes the partnership will enable safer immunotherapies and greater precision in who immunotherapy can treat.
“It will allow us to predict whether they’re going to have a response and, equally important, whether they are going to have any side effects,” he said.
The two companies will achieve this by analysing and correlating the immunotherapy treatment response of thousands of Vanderbilt’s cancer patients.
GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt will co-develop AI-powered apps using anonymised data from patients including their demographic, genomic, tumour and cellular data.
The AI apps will draw on this data to help physicians identify the most suitable treatment for each individual patient.
Both organisations will also develop new PET (positron emission tomography) imaging tracers.
A PET tracer is an imaging technique that is used to observe metabolic processes in the body and aids medical professionals in the diagnosis of a disease.
Together, the apps and tracers will help physicians to stratify cancer patients for clinical trials, with the hope that the PET tracers will also be used to monitor the efficacy of immunotherapies in everyday practice.
President and CEO of GE Healthcare, Kieran Murphy, said GE Healthcare looked forward to working with Vanderbilt.
“GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt will combine their data science, genomic, imaging and cellular analysis capabilities to help improve clinical decision-making.
“This partnership is a great example of the increasing convergence of the tools, technologies and data used by therapy innovators and healthcare providers,” he added.
The first AI app prototype will be available by the end of 2019 and the PET tracer by the end of 2020.
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