Medilink East Midlands Member organisation Intelligent OMICS Limited is the new identity for the Nottingham Trent University spinout CompanDX.
The re-brand comes after the Intelligent OMICS R&D team, led by AI expert and personalised medicine veteran Professor Graham Ball, achieved a major breakthrough in the development of the company’s Intuitive Informed Intelligence (I3) technology.
Following this research breakthrough, an analysis that would have taken six or seven months to complete can now be completed in two to three weeks. The system learns by repeated, sequential modelling of data and can process up to 50 million models to a given dataset per hour.
A recent study by MMC Ventures suggested that up to 4 in 10 healthcare AI companies do not, in fact, include any Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning (‘The State of AI, 2019: Divergence’). These companies often apply traditional regression analysis or similar or mimic established healthcare processes. Intelligent OMICS Limited is a company which brings together the advances in Biology and AI.
The Intelligent OMICS analysis applies AI to create new knowledge. Existing AI approaches continue to be constrained by existing human knowledge and miss the opportunity to develop new drugs and diagnostics. When studying a particular disease, approximately half of the key biomarkers that the Intelligent OMICS system identifies have not been linked with that disease before.
These biomarkers are not symptoms of a disease state but are the key drivers or determinants of the disease and represent crucial new knowledge of the disease under study.
Novel biomarkers can be used as new drug targets and the company’s ability to distil results down to the smallest viable number of biomarkers without compromising sensitivity or specificity mean that the results can be incorporated into laboratory-based or hand-held point of care diagnostics.
“People ask us about the new name” laughs Dr Simon Haworth, CEO of Intelligent OMICS. “Are you implying that other AI companies are ‘dumb’, they say? In actual fact, that is exactly what we are saying: Intelligent OMICS uses genuine artificial intelligence to analyse healthcare big data and to spot patterns that human researchers are incapable of identifying. We use a neural networks ‘learning’ approach, applying our patented I3 algorithm developed in house, to drive our work in personalised medicine. The new name reflects the breadth of what we can now do and differentiates us from the increasing number of companies offering AI and pseudo-AI packages as a solution to all manner of healthcare issues but without real biological relevance.”
He added: “In practice, the R&D gains achieved by Professor Ball and his team now enable us to address the most critical question in medicine today: what don’t we know about each disease that would enable us to diagnose it more quickly and treat or prevent it more effectively?
“For a disease like Alzheimer’s, the key question might be ‘Can we develop an early diagnostic from analysis of blood samples?’ whilst for chronic diseases such as COPD the question might be ‘Can we develop a drug to halt the progression of the disease?’ or ‘Can we develop a companion diagnostic to identify which drug is suitable for each individual patient? The healthcare market recognizes that we must base the creation of new drugs and diagnostics on analysis of healthcare big data but doesn’t yet know how. Intelligent OMICS provides that capability.”
For more information about Intelligent OMICS, visit their website – www.intellomx.com/
For more information about Medilink East Midlands, visit – www.medilinkmidlands.com/
For more information about Medilink East Midlands membership, and to apply, visit – www.medilinkmidlands.com/membership/
