The use of ultra large and multiple datasets will be investigated in a new alliance between Swiss-based Novartis and Oxford’s Big Data Insititute (BDI).
The five-year partnership will take multiple large datasets and identify trends in it using AI. The organisations hope this will provide insights into complex diseases that humans alone cannot, informing how clinical trials are designed and conducted.
The resources provided by the two companies cover both the analysis and the circumstantial knowledge.
The BDI has approximately five million patients internationally and statistical machine learning technology. Novartis has access to relevant anonymised clinical trial data.
The trends in the data should reveal commonalities across different diseases. Hence allow prediction of patients’ response to certain medicines, earlier than currently possible for clinical trials.
The start point of the alliance will be Novartis’ flagship programmes; MS, rheumatology and dermatology.