9 Jun 2021
Boehringer Ingelheim and Lifebit Biotech announce long-term partnership to use artificial intelligence to harvest real-world data to provide disease outbreak insights.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Image: Urupong © Adobe Stock
Animal health giant Boehringer Ingelheim has announced a long-term collaboration with a biotech firm to use artificial intelligence (AI) for detection and early reporting of global animal disease outbreaks.
Scientists and researchers from Boehringer Ingelheim and Lifebit Biotech will work together to combine real-world evidence and latest AI algorithms to more easily identify infectious disease outbreaks, particularly any crossing borders.
It is hoped the insights generated in the project will not only accelerate detection of the latest outbreaks, but allow targeting of research and development (R&D) efforts.
The Lifebit REAL platform will crunch real-world data harvested from scientific publications and other open sources, such as news sites, and automatically notify on relevant outbreaks, such as transboundary disease, or the emergence of pathogens such as COVID-19.
The Lifebit system combines data harvesting techniques and proprietary AI algorithms to cut through the available data, which can amount to thousands of scientific papers and millions of news stories published every day.
Eric Haaksma, head of animal health global innovation at Boehringer Ingelheim, said: “External innovation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our R&D playbook.
“Therefore, 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, in turn, 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.”
Maria Chatzou-Dunford, chief executive of Lifebit Biotech, said: “At Lifebit we thrive at connecting both locked-up sensitive biomedical data from around the world and AI-driven automated real-world evidence data insights – so that companies at the cutting edge of science, like Boehringer Ingelheim, can make faster and smarter decisions, delivering insights that change lives.”
