OWKIN, which builds machine learning technologies to enable medical and scientific discoveries, announced what is says is the world’s largest AI-powered medical research network. The OWKIN Loop Network is comprised of 44 prestigious hospitals and research institutions across the US and Europe, including Cleveland Clinic and Mount Sinai. The network enables researchers to train predictive models on real-world data at scale and transfer knowledge to a collective intelligence, benefitting fellow researchers, partner hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies in order to improve patient treatment and accelerate drug R&D.
OWKIN’s algorithms accelerate drug development by predicting toxicity, resistance and sensitivity to treatment outcomes, and disease evolution. Researchers on the OWKIN platform are empowered to train predictive models on historically siloed, real-world medical data. OWKIN Loop is the first at-scale solution of federated learning for the healthcare industry, allowing researchers to extract insights, preserve patient privacy, and contribute to better patient outcomes.
“Access to patient data is critical for improving medical research,” Thomas Clozel, M.D., co-founder and CEO of OWKIN, said in a statement. “But the current patient data brokerage system hinders knowledge-sharing and risks patient data privacy, resulting in knowledge silos at individual hospitals. We founded OWKIN to efficiently and intelligently transform hospital-level clinical data into predictive models. If we can transform the world’s clinical data into broadly accessible research knowledge, we believe we can fundamentally advance medical research and have an incredibly powerful impact on solving the most important medical challenges.”
The OWKIN Loop Network creates a partner ecosystem for sharing collective knowledge across research organizations and pharmaceutical companies seeking to advance R&D in oncology, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases. Partners within the OWKIN Loop Network include 44 leading international institutions. From Mount Sinai and Cleveland Clinic in the US, to Institut Curie, Centre Léon Bérard, Groupe AP-HP (a group of 39 hospitals in France), and Inserm in Europe, OWKIN Loop connects hundreds of doctors and researchers. Projects include the training of a predictive model that identified a combination of new quantitative biomarkers associated with prognosis in a rare cancer, the prediction of brain age from MRI, and the prediction of gene expression profiles from whole slide images as a marker of response to immunotherapy.