With the help of AI, BenevolentAI provide better treatments for the millions of patients

Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning have made great advances for the field of healthcare in last couple of years. AI is getting increasingly sophisticated at doing what humans do, but more efficiently, more quickly and at a lower cost. One of the leaders in the creation and application of AI and machine learning in medicine is British startup BenevolentAI. Their goal is to transform the way medicines are discovered and developed. Company integrates its technology into every step of the drug discovery process from hypothesis generation to late-stage clinical development. 

Accelerating the journey from data to medicine

Their team that includes over 200 world class biologists, chemists, engineers, informaticians, and data scientists is harnessing the power of AI to accelerate the journey from data to medicine. This journey starts with formulating a hypothesis that predicts the underlying cause of a disease and follows that through many rounds of experimentation and testing until they validate that hypothesis. Then they begin the process of designing, synthesizing and developing a new compound to treat that disease for a specific group of patients that are most likely to respond to that medicine. The Benevolent Platform focuses on three key areas; target identification, molecular design and precision medicine, to better understand the underlying mechanisms of disease and to develop new and more effective treatments for the millions of patients who need them.

Collaboration with UC San Diego to investigate Cerebral Cavernous Malformations

Two months ago the company announced that has entered a partnership with the University of California San Diego. They will collaborate on a new approach to develop non-invasive therapeutic treatments for cerebral cavernous malformations, a disease that causes the development of hemorrhagic vascular lesions in the brain and spinal cord. The collaboration, supported by the Angioma Alliance charity and funded by the Be Brave for Life Foundation, will aim to identify new genes responsible for development and progression of CCM disease and their implications in cardiovascular biology. BenevolentAI will apply its machine learning and data science models to identify new targets associated with this rare and complex disease for which the only current treatment option is brain surgery.

BenevolentAI is founded in 2013, and headquartered in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK) and further offices in New York. Company has active R&D drug program in disease areas such as ALS, Ulcerative Colitis and Sarcopenia. In 2019 company has raised $90 million from Temasek, a Singapore-headquartered investment company.

Is AI better at diagnoses than doctors?

Machine Learning and AI algorithms can learn to see patterns similarly to the way doctors see them. A key difference is that algorithms need a lot of concrete examples in order to learn. It is like a doctor using his built-in neural network. Because AI can identify large numbers of relationships in raw data, it can be used to support diagnosing, treating and predicting outcomes in many medical situations even better than humans. AI has the potential to be applied in almost every field of medicine including drug development, patient monitoring and personalized patient treatment plans.