Development of patient-centric digital biobank for world-leading chronic disease research: using AI to uniquely map genomic, clinical and longitudinal health data

Public description
The COVID-19 crisis has thrown into sharp focus the global inability to predict personalised disease progression i.e. why do some people suffer more severely than others or respond differently to treatments. The reason is complex and due to a combination of genetic, demographic, and phenotypic factors. For nearly every common and rare disease, there is no central repository nor tools/mechanisms for researchers to quickly access/harmonise/interrogate this data. This drastically reduces our ability to accurately identify those most at risk and to develop new medicines/treatments.

To address this and tap into a fast-growing £50bn+ market(alliedmarketresearch:2018), we intend to build a patient-centric, chronic disease digital biobank of genomic, clinical, and longitudinal health data.

As the market for personal genetic sequencing- both public and private (£19.2bn by 2025;19% CAGR-Allied Market Research:2017)- continues to grow, as does the volume of personal health data stored, which in turn opens up new opportunities for drug discovery, quicker access to target patient groups and reducing patient recruitment costs in medical research.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in particular have the potential to dramatically speed up the discovery of novel biomarkers for patient stratification and novel drug targets using multiple data-types including genomic, clinical, and patient-generated longitudinal data as input.

Medicines supported by genomics are 2-3x more likely to succeed, but accessing the right data is a major challenge. Using AI and Machine Learning approaches to statistical genetics, combined with big-data architectures, Sano Genetics, in partnership with Patients Know Best, C4X Discovery and BenevolentAI will develop the patient-centric digital biobank platform of genomic, clinical, and longitudinal health data (TRL6) that will allow users and to quickly identify phenotype-genotype patterns, in order to discover novel biomarkers to stratify patients and to discover novel drug targets and compounds.

To help build the platform, we have chosen to initially focus on Ulcerative Colitis(a form of Inflammatory Bowel Disease)- a market worth £17.4bn by 2026, that affects over 8m globally and that has significant available data- before looking to scale the platform to address the same data-access/analysis challenge in other chronic conditions and emerging threats such as COVID-19, where our ability to predict the diseases impact and severity in patients has created significant challenges in planning, resources and policy.