Sensyne Health signs five-year research deal with GOSH

Clinical artificial intelligence (AI) company Sensyne Health has signed a five-year non-exclusive strategic research agreement with the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH), it announced on Thursday, to analyse anonymised patient data using clinical AI technology.

The AIM-traded firm said the purpose of the agreement was to enable the “ethical application” of clinical AI research to improve paediatric clinical outcomes, and accelerate research into new medicines to find new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases.

It said the agreement was its first to focus on improving care and accelerating the development of medicines specifically for children.

The first project would focus on developing a clinical decision support algorithm to help clinicians caring for children with chronic kidney disease, which would then be used to develop further clinical support algorithms for other diseases in children.

Development of paediatric medicines, from discovery through clinical development, was described as “especially challenging” by the company.

Recent developments in clinical AI, and the use of real world data, provided an opportunity to develop new medicines and to accelerate the clinical development of treatments for childhood illnesses, which would be a key focus of the research that Sensyne and GOSH would seek to develop.

Under the agreement, Sensyne and GOSH would focus on three areas, with the first being paediatric drug discovery, helping to discover new medicines aimed at treating childhood diseases.

The second area of focus would be on clinical decision support tools to support children's care, developing and validating the effectiveness of new AI-enabled software tools to help clinicians analyse complex data sets so as to improve clinical decision-making.

Sensyne said AI algorithms would be developed to create early warning systems to identify children most at risk, and potentially allow earlier interventions, to help monitor how a child was responding to a particular treatment.

The third focus would be on clinical trial design, being the use of AI for the analysis of retrospective clinical data and the generation of synthetic control arms to support clinical trials more effectively, speeding up drug development for children.

“We are delighted to be undertaking research in partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital, widely recognised as one of the leading centres for children's healthcare and research in the world,” said chief executive officer Lord Drayson.

“GOSH has invested heavily in its digital infrastructure and curation of its data which means we can start work immediately.

“Together we aim to use the power of ethical AI to make a real difference in finding new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases and in future to develop a worldwide research community using ethical AI to improve the lives of children world-wide.”

At 1420 BST, shares in Sensyne Health were down 0.64% at 148.04p.