The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has signed an agreement with Sherpa.ai to improve the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases through the Basque company’s new artificial intelligence platform. The renowned institution is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the country’s health research agency. It is the largest biomedical research agency in the world.
With Sherpa.ai’s solution, the US health service will be able to train its algorithms with data from different hospitals and scientific organisations around the world ‘in a secure way and without them sharing patient data, thus respecting their privacy and enabling scientific progress’, says Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, founder and CEO of the startup.
He explains that medical institutions are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to find treatments for diseases that so far have no cure. The problem is that for algorithms that help detect what the human eye cannot see, such as patterns or biomarkers, to be effective they need to learn from patient data, which is usually private and confidential.
In most cases, data privacy and regulation make it impossible to share data, slowing down advances in the cure and treatment of diseases. This is even more complicated when it comes to rare diseases, as there are very few cases and, most of the time, the data is scattered in different hospitals, regions and even countries with different regulations.
Uribe-Etxebarria clarifies, in this context, why the US Department of Health has chosen his technology. ‘The traditional way to make these algorithms learn would be to send this private medical data to a common server and train it, but that would violate patient privacy and breach regulations, not to mention other implications such as high energy consumption. Instead, our software allows the training to be distributed and produced locally, and only the enhancements are combined in the cloud, so no patient data leaves the hospital.
According to NIH senior investigator Carsten G. Bönnemann, the application of artificial intelligence through Sherpa.ai’s federated learning platform ‘could make it possible to explore new diagnostic and treatment possibilities for a group of diseases that currently have no specific treatment’.
The results of the joint work will be made public in the coming months. ‘Although it is still too early to draw conclusions, the first data are very encouraging. And if this is confirmed, it will be a giant step forward in the treatment and cure of these diseases,’ continues the Spanish executive.
The agreement with the NIH comes just two months after the Spanish startup announced an important alliance with Telefónica to offer companies in any sector advanced artificial intelligence that will enable them to improve their financial, operational and sustainability results. To do so, they will also rely on Sherpa.ai’s new AI platform.
Last October, the Basque company also closed another agreement with KPMG for the consultancy firm to distribute the same platform among its clients. The aim of this partner is to offer the Spanish firm’s artificial intelligence solution in the 147 countries where it is present, although for a few months it will focus its efforts on the Spanish market. Both the agreement with NIH and those with Telefónica and KPMG represent a strong backing for the Spanish startup’s technology.
Sherpa.ai closed a €7.2 million funding round in March 2021 and is preparing another of between €20 and €30 million to make the final leap and become the ‘European champion’ of artificial intelligence. With the same goal in mind, last October it appointed Tom Gruber, founder and CTO of Siri, as the company’s director of Artificial Intelligence Strategy. His team also includes Joanna Hoffman, formerly Apple’s chief marketing officer, and Doug Solom, the iPhone maker’s former chief strategy officer.
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