App will process health data
Agora Labs, a two-year-old startup founded by two Greeks and an Italian, is developing a platform to allow pharmaceuticals firms, artificial intelligence firms and researchers access to voluminous real world data created by public hospitals, patients’ medical histories and an array of medical devices.
George Pikramenos, one of the three co-founders of the startup, itself a spinoff from a research center, acknowledges there are privacy issues. But, he adds, there is a huge trove of data out there which calls for processing.
Such processing could provide answers to crucial issues, such as a drug’s side effects, how drugs react in combination with other drugs, and their cost to national health systems, and monitor rare diseases on which it is impossible to conduct randomized clinical trials.
“New technologies based around artificial intelligence are being developed all the time. There are companies building diagnostic models and they need to process great amounts of data,” says Pikramenos.
Health services are estimated to generate 30% of all data globally. Access to such data is not easy and there could be quality problems hindering processing.
