Boehringer Ingelheim, a global leader in animal health, announces the beginning of a long-term partnership with Lifebit Biotech to utilise Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the detection and early-reporting of global disease outbreaks using real-world data harvested from scientific publications and other open sources. Utilising the Lifebit REAL platform, insights into the latest infectious disease outbreaks allow R and D efforts to be prioritised accordingly.
Scientists and researchers from the two organisations will work side-by-side to combine real-world evidence and the latest AI algorithms to identify infectious disease outbreaks and respond accordingly. Lifebit REAL uses advanced analytic capabilities to automatically notify users of relevant outbreaks, such as transboundary disease spread or the emergence of pathogens, such as COVID-19. The system is built around an active learning architecture: with more relevant data ingested, the accuracy of the system increases.
As an example, over 500 million tweets, 3 million news articles and thousands of scientific papers are published every day. However, with the sea of data being so vast, it is challenging for decision makers to collate meaningful insights that are both useful and actionable. Lifebit’s system alleviates these difficulties by combining precision data harvesting techniques with proprietary cutting-edge AI algorithms to identify signals from all the data noise.
Dr. Eric Haaksma, Head of Animal Health Global Innovation Boehringer Ingelheim, shared: “External innovation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our R and 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.”
Dr. Maria Chatzou-Dunford, CEO of Lifebit Biotech, added: “At Lifebit we thrive at connecting both locked-up sensitive biomedical data from around the world and AI-driven automated RWE 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.”
