Scientists who want to harness AI for medical discovery wrestle with the difficulty of getting sufficient data for the job. That’s a hurdle startup Network Bio aims to remove.
Siloed at medical centers, patient data are competitive assets for their institutions—not resources that are shared easily. But Network, a four-year-old startup, has persuaded three academic medical centers to share access to their “biobanks,” repositories of blood and organ-tissue samples from patients who have consented to having their samples used for research.
“It’s this infrastructure problem that’s preventing the adoption of AI at scale in the medical system,” Asad Ali Ahmad, co-founder and chief executive said.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup has formed collaborations with Mass General Brigham, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Colorado Anschutz and intends to sign other medical institutions on as well.
By pooling access to biobanks, Network aims to create data sets large enough to answer questions that scientists have struggled to answer before, such as why certain drugs work on some patients but not others.
Full article: Startup to Link ‘Biobanks’ of Patient Tissue to Supercharge AI Medical Research (WSJ)