Pangaea Data awarded strategic partnership with M-RIC

Pangaea Data has been selected by Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC) for a strategic partnership that   will see its AI-driven product be used to characterise mental health patients and discover new clinically actionable intelligence.

M-RIC was recently established by Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Liverpool, as part of the UK government’s national Mental Health Mission. It is funded by the Office for Life Sciences and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Its aim is to create the infrastructure needed for research and innovation, focusing on under-researched and under-funded areas such as early intervention in psychosis, mood disorders and children and young people.

The newly formed M-RIC will be applying an AI product from Pangaea Data to help find more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and miscoded patients.

The AI tool characterises patients by automatically discovering clinical signatures for 4,000 hard to diagnose conditions, in a privacy-preserving and scalable manner.

Professor Nusrat Husain, director of research and innovation and global centre for research on mental health inequalities at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Early detection and intervention are critical elements of our clinical practice at both individual and population level, providing a vital mechanism to improve access to mental health services, particularly within the underserved population.

“Through partnerships we have created, such as with Pangaea, we are provided the opportunity to speed up the early identification and treatment in a timely manner. This will not only positively benefit the people across Cheshire and Merseyside and beyond, but it will also create a blueprint replicable nationally and globally.”

Pangaea Data’s product will allow M-RIC to improve screening rates and help recruit more suitable patients for clinical trials and care. Using AI, it is hoped that more patients will be discovered who otherwise may have been missed if searches were limited to metadata or generic natural language processing-based approaches.

According to the company, the product has been clinically proven to find 22 times more undiagnosed, miscoded and at-risk patients and match patients five times more suitable for clinical trials and therapies. In addition, it also says the tool can halve treatment costs, save 90% in costs and time in comparison to manual and NLP-based methods, predict prognosis and discover new relationships between drugs, features and adverse events.

Dr. Vibhor Gupta, founder and director at Pangaea, said: “The application of Pangaea’s product in the context of mental health conditions is critical, for both patients and clinicians, to support preventative health and precision medicine.”

At the start of this year Pangaea Data was shortlisted as one of the start-ups for the Digital Health Rewired Pitchfest 2023.