UK life sciences partnership to use AI in disease detection
The UK government and the life sciences industry have partnered to develop new technology using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect diseases at an early stage.
Called Accelerating Detection of Disease, the programme comes as part of the government’s second Life Sciences Sector Deal, with investment from over ten companies to support the project.
The government announced yesterday that global biopharmaceutical company, UCB, will invest £1 billion ($1.27 billion) in research and development, backed by an additional £79 million of government funding. A total of £1.3 billion is being invested by the public and private sectors.
Accelerating Detection of Disease will study five million healthy people over several years to develop new diagnostic tests using AI. Researchers will examine how the group’s health changes, identifying common characteristics to understand how and why diseases develop.
It will be the largest study of its kind collecting such a range of data from healthy volunteers over a long period of time.
The research will be led by professor Sir John Bell, the regius chair of medicine at Oxford University, and is supported by the National Health Service and leading charities. These include Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation and Alzheimer’s Research UK.
If the programme is successful, the government predicts tens of thousands of lives could be saved by early detection of deadly diseases before symptoms even appear.
This prediction is supported by Cancer Research UK, which estimates that if late-stage diagnosis were halved across bowel, ovary, prostate and lung cancer, over 55,500 more people would be diagnosed at an early stage. This would potentially result in 22,500 fewer deaths per year within five years of diagnosis.
The news was announced by business secretary Greg Clark, who said the programme “aims to teach the general public to understand their risk of developing diseases and take steps to remain healthy for longer”.
Clark added that part of UCB’s investment will be used to build a new £150 to 200 million research and development facility in the UK over the next five years.
Health secretary Matt Hancock said technology and AI have “the potential to revolutionise healthcare by unlocking the next generation of treatments and helping patients take greater control of their own health”.
The government hopes that the project will also attract investment from global life science companies seeking to develop new diagnostic tools and treatments.
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