Sponsored Insight
Every day, AI touches nearly every aspect of our lives in a variety of ways. Digital voice assistants remind us to pack an umbrella when the forecast calls for rain. Streaming services fueled by powerful algorithms deliver content that is perfectly tailored to our interests. And in some US cities, AI-trained self-driving taxis have taken to the streets. For each of these applications, AI technology advanced at unprecedented rates through ambitious R&D programs and intrepid early adopters who provided proof of concept testing.
The healthcare industry, in contrast, is still in the nascent stage of AI innovation and adoption. Compared to other industries, healthcare has one of the highest bars for safety, which presents challenges in introducing and achieving broad acceptance of new technologies. The goal of any AI system is to perform tasks without requiring human oversight, and there is a long road ahead before fully autonomous medicine is tested, proven, and ultimately adopted.
As daunting of a goal as that sounds, the companies prioritizing AI innovation today understand that AI is progressing at a rate that constantly exceeds expectations—problems that typically take ten years to solve are being solved in one year. AI-first companies that hire top AI scientists into leadership positions are best poised to stay ahead of this rapidly advancing technology and learn how to leverage it. Companies that focus on demonstrating the safety and efficacy of AI in medicine will be the ones to push technology to its full potential within the next decade, accelerating the transformation seen across other industries.
Why Unlearn is an AI-first company
As an AI-focused company, Unlearn is fully invested in building AI today that will revolutionize medicine tomorrow. Our approach to innovation rests on moonshot thinking — by setting radically ambitious goals, we believe we can make the impossible possible and solve a problem that impacts the lives of millions. Through fast-paced experimentation and iteration, we aim to advance AI to eliminate trial and error in medicine.
We envision a future where AI helps doctors to make more accurate diagnoses and develop personalized treatment plans for their patients. Patients will no longer endure diagnostic delays, unnecessary tests and surgeries, or ineffective treatments that lead to poor outcomes. An AI-powered future will enable a more efficient and ethical healthcare system.
Prognostic digital twins: Smaller, faster clinical trials today—personalized medicine tomorrow.
Today, Unlearn is innovating one specific piece of this AI-powered future that is expected to have an enormous impact—digital twin technology. Unlearn’s prognostic digital twins are comprehensive, longitudinal predictions of the clinical trajectory of a patient under the control condition. Prognostic scores derived from digital twins are used in randomized controlled trials, called TwinRCTsTM, to significantly reduce control arm sizes and generate regulatory-suitable evidence in less time.
The digital twins employed in TwinRCTs today, will transform the status quo at every step of the patient journey in the future, from diagnosis to treatment. Digital twins will one day be capable of replacing the control group entirely, allowing clinical trials to be run with less patient participation. And though it may seem like a pipe dream now, personalized digital twins will eventually serve as physiological proxies for individual patients. As our AI models become even better at making predictions of patient health outcomes, advanced digital twins will be capable of determining precise diagnoses, modeling disease progressions, and calculating treatment plans. While personalized digital twins may not be developed within our lifetimes, that future draws closer every time digital twins are employed in TwinRCTs.
In addition to innovating digital twins, Unlearn is paving the way for broader acceptance of AI technology in medicine by working directly with regulators. This year, Unlearn received regulatory approval from the European Medicines Agency, validating our approach to using digital twins. This qualification opinion represents the first time a regulatory body has formally supported a machine learning-based method for reducing sample size in clinical trials. Unlearn’s sky-high bar for producing rigorous, regulatory-suitable evidence has earned the trust of some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies who value being at the forefront of AI in medicine.
Advancing AI for better patient outcomes
AI has drastically impacted our world, changing how we live and work in many ways. From the increased use of automation to the development of intelligent machines that can perform unsupervised tasks, AI has increased efficiency and productivity across a multitude of industries. We can expect AI’s impact on medicine will be just as significant.
AI-first companies like Unlearn are laying the groundwork today for this exciting future. By advancing AI that complies with regulatory guidelines for safety and efficacy, we believe the era of human experimentation will finally end, ushering in a better future through personalized medicine.
Download our latest Endpoints webinar featuring Unlearn’s founder and CEO, Charles Fisher, to learn more about the current and future applications of AI in medicine.