GE Healthcare and SOPHiA GENETICS, a global healthcare data-sharing network have agreed to collaborate on advancing cancer care by developing genomic-based AI.
By combining GE Healthcare’s medical imaging capabilities with SOPHiA GENETICS’ analytic genomic insight platform, the two organizations intend to serve both the clinical and biopharma markets.
"The integration of genomics-based artificial intelligence into oncology workflow solutions would be a major breakthrough for integrated cancer medicine and for future clinical research, which increasingly depend on the ability to select those patients most likely to respond to new therapies," Jan Makela, President & CEO, Imaging at GE Healthcare said in a press release. "This collaboration represents another step in GE Healthcare's vision of making precision health—more efficient and personalized care—a reality.”
According to the organizations, there is an increasing demand for data-driven medicine in the face of the steadily rising number of cancer cases around the world. GE Healthcare will use its Edison platform to integrate data from several different resources, including EHRa, radiology information systems (RIS) and other medical device data to develop and deploy AI solutions. Among other things, the new technology will focus on simplifying the oncology patient workflow, better understanding increasingly complicated clinical patient data, and comparing data from patient to patient.
GE Healthcare has deep expertise in clinical workflows, deep learning AI algorithms for image reconstruction and image segmentation, analytics and standardization, while SOPHiA GENETICS is a pioneer in data-driven medicine. Their cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics platform uses AI and machine learning to generate actionable insights for clinicians and researchers from complex multimodal datasets. The companies aim to break down the data silos across instruments and sites that so often delay or even prevent patients from getting the most appropriate treatment both in cancer and in other diseases.
"By bringing together our global platform and insights-sharing network with GE Healthcare's international reach and cutting-edge products, healthcare professionals will be able to leverage their expertise and work together for the benefit of patients all over the world,” noted Jurgi Camblong, co-founder and CEO, SOPHiA GENETICS. “Cancer patients will be able to receive equal access to better diagnoses and treatments through secure data pooling and knowledge sharing, unlocking the promise of data-driven medicine at scale.”
The companies note that next-generation sequencing (NGS) is quickly becoming the new standard of care for cancer diagnostics, especially as more therapies require genomic information to be prescribed in a personalized method. Currently, these sets of information and insights are difficult for clinicians to easily and quickly obtain along the patient’s care journey.
Photo by LeoWolfert/Getty Images