Lifebit and Boehringer collaborate to detect infectious disease outbreaks

Pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim and biotech Lifebit have announced a long-term partnership working on detecting and reporting global disease outbreaks.

The companies will utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to study real-world data harvested from scientific publications and other open sources, in order to detect any outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Lifebit will use its REAL platform, which uses advanced analytic capabilities to automatically notify users of relevant outbreaks, such as transboundary disease spread or the emergence of pathogens, such as Covid-19. With the system being built around an active learning architecture, it’s hoped that as more relevant data is put into it, the accuracy of the system will increase.

Potential data areas include things like tweets and social media posts, news articles, and scientific papers. With these data being so vast currently, it’s difficult for decision-makers to collate meaningful insights that are both useful and actionable. Lifebit is aiming to cut through any non-meaningful data through its platform and its combination of precision data harvesting techniques and AI algorithms.

By using Lifebit’s platform and gaining insights into the latest infectious disease outbreaks Boehringer Ingelheim’s R&D efforts to be prioritised accordingly, the company says.

Dr Eric Haaksma, head of Animal Health Global Innovation Boehringer Ingelheim, shared: “External innovation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our R&D playbook. Therefore, we are strategically partnering with Lifebit to leverage AI to monitor and interpret scientific and other sources in real-time, enabling us to track data related to animal diseases. This, in turn, will accelerate the detection process as the vast amounts of scientific relevant information being produced at many levels cannot be feasibly collected and analysed manually.”

Dr Maria Chatzou-Dunford, Lifebit CEO, added: “At Lifebit, we thrive at connecting both, locked-up sensitive biomedical data from around the world and AI-driven automated RWE data insights - so that companies at the cutting edge of science, like Boehringer Ingelheim, can make faster and smarter decisions - delivering insights that change lives.”