Dr. Hector Zenil, CEOThe greatest challenges confronting the field of precision medicine today can be classified into two categories. The first relates to the current generalised practices that provide healthcare only when people feel unwell, something which Dr. Hector Zenil, the founder and CEO of Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA), terms ‘sick care,’ as opposed to ‘healthcare.’ For example, as regards blood test results, despite the fact that it is now known how different each person is and how small changes, even within the healthy population average, are highly informative and predictive of disease and even death, current practice does not exploit this predictive capacity. The second challenge relates to the age-old scarcity of data. In the context of true healthcare, big data ought to empower each person to generate their personal data and utilise and exploit it in the interests of their current and future health, which is not the case at present .
OIA moves to address these challenges. Through its flagship product, Algocyte, the company is changing and moving medicine and healthcare away from a reliance on population-wide symptom pattern matching and toward precision medicine and personalised diagnostics. To achieve this, the company leverages responsible AI to monitor the immune system for early detection and treatment management. “Algocyte is an AI that learns from and monitors each individual’s health, in particular markers related to the immune system, and provides an immune-age related score that allows both patients and clinicians to pick up and monitor small but informative health trends over time,” says Dr. Zenil.
According to a survey of Algocyte’s solution independently conducted by a large NHS-affiliated clinic in the North of London, medical staff said that the use of Algocyte’s immune score for triaging purposes could save up to two to three hours a week per junior doctor and nurse effectively increasing their capacity roughly by 5%.
“This kind of time saving capability is huge, considering the very serious decades-long shortage of medical staff, both nurses and medical doctors, and heavily understaffed hospitals, a problem made worse by the pandemic,” according to Dr. Zenil. The product also learns the user’s baselines and flags for possible changes, even within population-wide normal reference values, effectively creating a patient’s own personalised reference values. The reality is that more human doctors or nurses won’t be trained to keep up with the population, and thus science, technology and AI will have to pitch in and support current and future staff not only to do what they did but also increase satisfaction both of clinicians and patients from better outcomes. And that’s precisely what Algocyte does.
OIA is changing and moving medicine and healthcare away from a reliance on population-wide symptom pattern matching and toward precision medicine and personalized diagnostics.
The fruit of years of research at some of the world’s top ranked universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Karolinska, by Dr. Zenil and his team, Algocyte mimics a medical scientist and augments the capabilities of individual clinicians, providing them with sophisticated tools for decision support. This type of intuitive and responsible AI is capable of understanding cause and effect thus dealing not only with symptoms but with root causes, as it is model driven in the most fundamental sense. In other words, OIA has been hard wired from top-down and the bottom up to implement powerful, responsible, proprietary (traceable and liable) AI rather than simply implementing other people’s (most likely unsuitable) machine learning libraries available over the counter. “At OIA we think only this kind of more responsible AI is suitable for medicine and healthcare,” states Dr. Zenil. With Algocyte and its proprietary scores, the danger of health professionals overlooking parameters that drift into to abnormal personal territory is minimised. Not only does the company flag markers, it allows clinicians to set their own patient profiles without losing track of less salient markers over time.
Having carved out a unique niche, OIA is working on opening up world markets, starting with the UK, Canada and India. “The UK and Canada will become our reference sites for moving in the near future to the US; and India will test our capacity to serve a huge market with a large appetite for cutting-edge solutions, the fastest growing in the medical devices space,” says Dr. Zenil. Further, OIA will release hardware that will complement the Algocyte AI platform next year. “This will create a lot of synergy and introduce a full end-to-end health monitoring solution not currently available in the market, empowering both patients and clinicians to have a better and more integrated experience,” concludes Dr. Zenil.
