Akkure4Covid- AI trial matching

“Eroom’s Law” observes that new drug development is getting sequentially slower and more expensive. Trials average a decade, costing billions with only 1 in 10 drugs that enter Phase 1 approved. Delays result in opportunity costs w.r.t speed of discovery especially for infectious outbreaks like COVID-19. With the pandemic crisis it is imperative that new strategies for recruiting patients at speed and scale utilising telemedicine and analytics are developed to permit the discovery of new targeted therapeutics.

Akkure have deployed a COVID ‘MedBot’ that offers personalised, mass population automated screening and risk stratification for COVID-19 infection severity, utilised to date with over 60,000 consults in 15 countries, 12 languages and 6 jurisdictions. The MedBot is integrated with an AI powered clinical trials matching platform of 280,000 global trials, leveraging automated NLP robotic telemedicine consults. Akkure fundamentally transforms the existing recruitment model by incentivising and empowering citizens to engage directly.

Finding patients for clinical trials is challenging because of poor, analogue, trial infra-structure, small numbers of patients at individual centres, poor trial awareness, and time burdens on both clinicians and patients. Delays in recruitment result in financial losses of up to $8 million per day. Patient recruitment represents a substantial percentage of a clinical trial’s overall costs and 20-40% of clinical trials fail due to poor recruitment. Current models rely on pharmaceutical driven hospital based enrolment. 

Patients don’t have the insights and skills to navigate complex eligibility, relying on overburdened physicians to identify appropriate trials maintaining awareness of the thousands of potentially relevant ones per patient. Equally disadvantaged patients may not have access to doctors or medical resources to begin the process of contributing data, representing a massive loss to equitable creation of therapeutics for certain ethnicities.

New innovative models are needed using AI augmented techniques for assessment and matched virtual recruitment. High resolution clinical and genomic data offers the ability to stratify patients into groups, greatly improving the speed and success of trials and decreasing costs as both the number of patients to illustrate the efficacy of the drug is reduced and this number is recruited quicker.

Akkure’s solution connects individuals to trials via their clinical data automatically and at scale. Our precision medicine trial techniques automate patient cohort identification, greatly improving the speed, success and accuracy of a trial whilst decreasing costs. Akkure has created an online platform that analyses clinical data from live or asynchronous robotic (automated) virtual tele-medical consults, to match patients with relevant and appropriate trials. We deploy AI powered ‘MedBots’ on multiple existing websites (no new APPs required), that exercise population level risk stratification and clinical impact assessment of patients for the disease of interest (COVID-19) via a simple web integration serving as ‘funnels’ for targeted patient recruitment.

Matching of patients with ongoing new clinical trials for COVID occurs constantly using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning of patient video consults. Our technology fuses asynchronous / live telemedicine with natural language processing to interrogate a range of data points and AI techniques (electronic medical record free text, speechtotext conversations, contextual key word alerts) to determine clinical status, trial matching eligibility and patient preference. Our solution for precision virtual trial recruitment integrates NLP trial eligibility, speech to text, automated trial matching, virtual trials, MedBot recruitment, algorithmic scoring, robotic tel-trial consults, dynamic monitoring.

The current imperative to develop cures for COVID-19 is global and addresses a multi-trillion dollar existential societal threat. It will be available in over 100 languages and interrogate all COVID-19 related trials (and 250,000 others). The chatbot technological architecture allows for global widespread adoption with rapid deployment on any existing website. Our innovation fundamentally transforms the existing clinical trials model by enabling citizens to engage directly rather than relying on 3rd parties, empowering them via trusted community pharmacies and primary health clinics.

With millions of people becoming infected internationally, yet with over 80% not requiring medical assistance, remote digital monitoring and capture of the data of these patients in virtual COVID clinical trials must be automated, ensuring no opportunity data loss with simultaneous sufficient powering of machine learning trial algorithms. 

Empowering citizens individually to connect with appropriate trials ensures that new therapeutics are based on globally relevant data sets not confined to wealthier populations. This solution democratises the access for all patients to relevant clinical trials. This affords benefits both in terms of immediate access to potentially disease altering drugs but also ensures future new therapeutics are developed using data (genetic, clinical) that is specific to their racial geno/phenotypes.

Akkure provides individualised, yet population level, automated, risk stratification and dynamic assessment of clinical impact with personalised advice provided, with surge prediction, resource allocation and re-emergence identification. Free, fast, easy to use tools target and filter cohorts of citizens who can directly contribute to matched clinical trials for COVID, offering reactive and predictive pandemic solutions but crucially; preventative and curative ones. We transform healthcare access, offering advice, guidance, probability diagnostics and clinical trial awareness to those with no medical support.

A global virtual clinical trials recruitment infrastructure facilitating rapid dissemination and acceleration of thousands of COVID-19 trials, benefiting all humankind.

Multiple innovative components in both design, technology, solutions architecture, trials infrastructure and pharmaco-economic modelling.:

1. The underlying technology. Leveraging NLP to interrogate free text from both clinical data and trial data and matching of these for suitability

2. Integration of this NLP technology via SMRT on FHIR interrogation of both retrospective clinical data in the form of EMR and prospective ‘live’ data in the form Telemedicine consults.

3. Use of asynchronous, expedited automatic robotic ‘quantum consults’ to allow for rapid population level matching of patients with trials 

4. Strategy of deploying Chatbots onto existing sites to rapidly recruit millions of volunteers rather than creating a standalone unknown new APP or Platform

5. Transformative clinical trial infrastructure for patent centric population level mass participation and data capture rather than existing analogue, siloed researcher driven process.

6. Empowering patients by creating a virtual infrastructure to leverage their collective data ensuring rewards and a shared value process is established in trial outcome and ownership.

Existing charitable sites list trials relevant to a specific condition. Individual patients have no insights or knowledge to empower them with the appropriate trial choice, a similar problem exists for doctors who cannot know the massive range of available and appropriate trials for their diverse patients. Existing clinic trial sponsors approach trial sites or hospitals with their own trial ensuring an opportunity cost for others by exclusion.

Natural language processing integrated with speech to text AI and contextual sensing and clinical status. Scientific innovation Patent: Quantum Consult Patent No. 2018100730. A computer implemented system for generating patient medial summarises and initiates a medical consultation in both live and asynchronous forms. 

Also developing a blockchain permissioned access to data for clinical trial sharing via virtual servers ensuring no compromise of raw data to 3rd parties (such as pharmaceutical sponsors) once permission withdrawn

-Natural language processing is widely used in a number of applications in health

-Speech to text is widely used in a number of applications

-Chat bots are widely used in a number of applications including health 

The integration of asynchronous automated virtual and robotic clinical trial recruitment tools for patient driven trials at a population scale has not been previously demonstrated however we have finalised over 60,000 automated ‘Medbot’ consults with matching for COVID-19 clinical trials. 

The current imperative to develop cures for COVID-19 is global and solves a multi-trillion dollar existential societal threat. The technological architecture of using a chatbot rather than a proprietary APP, allows for global widespread adoption. It will be available in over 100 languages and interrogate thousands of COVID-19 related trials and the other 280,000 global ones listed.

With millions of people becoming infected internationally, yet with over 80% not requiring medical assistance, remote digital monitoring and capture of the data of these patients in virtual COVID clinical trials must be automated, ensuring no opportunity data loss with simultaneous sufficient powering of machine learning trial algorithms.

The COVID pandemic has allowed us to deploy our existing technologies with new innovations in integration and automated teletrials to expedite our engagement with global pharmaceutical and clinical research organisations. The range of partnerships created to help address COVID clinical trials ensures that the acute learnings will be subsequently deployed in our cancer and rare disease verticals, providing sustained impact well beyond the confines of the singular COVID disease.

Akkure have deployed a COVIDChatbot that offers personalised, mass population level automated screening and risk stratification for COVID-19 infection severity, utilised to date with over 60,000 consults in 15 countries, 12 languages and 6 jurisdictions. Now distributed by 304 community pharmacies representing over half of all Irish pharmacies.

Akkure will create the virtual trial infrastructure to match patients at scale to trial opportunities for automated recruitment and dynamic data capture and retention. Major health and associated economic and societal impacts will be secured by assisting populations to engage, be reassured, and be empowered to rapidly share their own health data to contribute to creating a precision population cohort for clinical trial integration and recruitment with the ultimate aim of creating new therapeutics.

Current number: 60,000 active consults 

Addressable market: 200 million

Addressable market 5 years: 2 Billion

-We Currently serve 4,500,000 people.

-In 1 year we will target the populations of the EU, USA, Canada and Australia / New Zealand. Hence the number will be over 1 Billion

-In less than five years we would expect to have global partnerships with all countries and populations being able to contribute their data remotely.

Our solution transforms the clinical trial industry by changing the ownership and centricity of trials to patients and charities bypassing siloed researchers and big pharma control via targeted recruitment in primary health. 

Akkure is an existing member of Amazon and Microsoft scaleup programmes, Akkure will iterate this existing COVID Medbot and integrate it into another of our digital health solutions, an AI powered clinical trials matching platform, part of the recent successful €6.3 Million DTIF consortium with the Royal college of surgeons in Ireland and Microsoft. 

This will enable rapid, mass population targeting and cohort identification of people suitable for clinical trial participation, matching them based on medical conditions and automated robotic telemedicine consults with relevant trials both domestically and globally. This solution is global, rapidly scalable and dynamically matches to over 280,000 clinical trials using natural language processing, speech to text and predictive AI.

European wide and US deployment of the COVID MedBot onto pharmaceutical and health sites.

Expansion via partnership with social media and tech companies (Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft)

Development / optimisation of a Voicebot to allow for automated sequential engagement and follow up of millions of citizens.

Partnership with big pharma to secure infrastructure for clinical trial recruitment and matched cohorts of patients with CV19.

Roll out of COVID monitoring app to allow for Virtual clinics for automated follow up and predictive interventions.

Securing of grants for the development of our digital diagnostics to allow for assessment of respiratory function using audio signal processing and ML.

1. Legal - GDPR

2. Market - Language

3. Technical - User interface, Voice

4. Financial - funding for rapid market access

Our Medbot is currently the only GDPR compliant solution in the UK and Ireland focused on COVID-19. We engaged with the Irish Governments data commissioner to ensure compliance. 

We have developed the Medbot into 12 major languages with all European languages in development. Languages include Arabic and Turkish to enable refugee populations who might otherwise have limited access to resources.

We will leverage AI APIs to allow for global linguistic compatibility.

The parallel development of a COVID vociebot helps an elderly population who might struggle with a chatbot. We will continue to pursue our research collaboration with AWS and the ALEXA team.

We are engaged with a number of both pharmaceutical Corporate venture capital groups and entrepreneurs in the pharmacy space. 

We are simultaneously exploring how to ensure ownership remains with patients and charities via looking at a funding structure that incorporates a crowd funding mechanism for philanthropic venture capital to ensure aligned investors and owners. 

Full time - 4

Part time - 2

Contractors - 8

Akkure’s team is led by founder Prof Oran Rigby MD - an experienced medical clinician, researcher, technologiest and entrepreneur. He is a 2015 Churchill scholar, a senior specialist in Intensive care medicine & surgery at St. Vincents hospital, with Australian and European postgraduate qualifications in Surgery, Aeromedicine, Tropical Medicine & International Health. His 2015 Churchill fellowship was awarded to support research into innovative applications for Robotics and Telemedicine. As Professor with the Queensland University of Technology (Australia) Department of Robotics & Autonomous Systems he has international networks to ensure wide collaboration.

Akkure has pivoted its resources to repurposing the existing COVID medbot. We have engineering and design resources ready to immediately implement and develop the technological aspects of the clinical model. No additional hiring is required, all research supports are in place and work can begin as soon as possible.

The team represents a fusion of professionals from diverse multidisciplinary fields, with data scientists, software engineers, bioinformatics designers, clinical researchers and senior physicians/surgeons from key fields responding to the COVID crisis (ICU / Respiratory / Public health).  

Akkure is one of enterprise Ireland's high potential digital health startups (HPSU). Recognising the solutions offered, Microsoft fast tracked Akkure in 12 hours to membership its startup program.  Previous grant funding has resulted in a range of proprietary technology and scientific patents.

Rapid national scale has already been achieved with our 12 pharmacy chain partners, (representing over half of Irish pharmacies), ensuring broad patient access and distribution. Similar strategies will be pursued internationally.

Royal college of surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) - International world-leading international health sciences university and research institution. Part of European consortium grant for clinical trial data privacy via hybrid blockchain permissioned cloud architecture. RCSI provide regulatory and genomic project input

Microsoft Europe - large global enterprise technology provider. Part of the health and education division. Collaborators in €6.3 million clinic trials grant. Contributing blockchain workbench engineering and Azure hosted AI tool integrations

Uniphar - global pharmacy organisation of over 180 community pharmacies and global partner to pharma and medtech manufacturers, working to improve patient access to medicines in Europe and around the world. Distribute our Medbot over their digital assets to access thousands of clients.

ICON Plc - 5th largest clinical research organisation in world with global provider of outsourced development and commercialisation services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and government and public health organisations. Partner is EU EIT Health clinical trials consortium to deploy Medbot.

Roche Pharma - Worlds second larges pharmaceutical organisation. Working with Global Healthcare innovation division. Partnering on digital diagnostic biomarkers for COVID as part of EU consortium.

Trinity College Dublin - School of AI and data science, partnering to research 'dark' matter of COVID related genome w.r.t sepsis and outcomes.

Impact and awareness

creation of networks and partners to plan new solutions

secure partnerships with charities to help provide them with the virtual infrastructure to organise and collectivise their data in order to secure patient centric clinical trials determined and influenced by patient outcomes rather than pure scientific surrogates. The citizen jury.

In turn transform the value proposition around clinical trials and new therapeutics whereby those contributing enjoy partial ownership of the novel therapeutic, a new pharmacy-economic concept we call CTR clinical trial equity. 

Finally create an entirely new generation of mass population rapid data driven virtual trials at a precision medical level. Leverage subjective clinical data with objective genomic data and dynamic physiological data - the 'biosome'. Empower citizens via 'Medbots' to funnel their data as 'Netizens' and create genuine power and collectives of patient from all ethnicities, disease cohorts and demographics to drive true equity of access to novel therapeutics for all.

Pharma

Health charities and advocacy 

Worked for 3 months in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis response leading teams as the senior ICU medical specialist.

Created the response strategy of 'Pods & Zones' to help the university hospital  maintain safety and clinical efficacy for staff and patients.

We leverage AI via natural language processing and speech to text with contextually sensitive interpretation to match patients and cohorts of similar patients to trials personalised for both individuals and cohort of similar individuals. 

We create the digital infrastructure to allow patients from anywhere in the world connect and collaborate with others to empower them to own their own data and benefit from sharing their data with big pharma and medical researchers. We do not share the data and benefit via 3rd parties, rather we provide the architecture for patients and charities to maximise the benefit of their own data and thus secure both future solutions and the ability to AFFORD these same solutions.

We have ensured from the initial architectural design that our solutions are accessible by all with access to multi-lingual Medbots so that those who are most vulnerable and without ready access to medical care can utilise our tools to secure guidance and advice on their risk of COVID-19 infection and the impact of same, whilst personalising guidance and advice based on their answers. Ensuring languages and access is key to preventing the continued and sustained outbreaks that occur in refugee camps and communities and which have a severe and profound impact greater than the morbidity associated with more affluent and resourced communities.