OIA, Key Partner In Uk’s Epsrc Research Network, Awarded Grant To Explore The Future Of Blood Testing
Oxford Immune Algorithmics’ (OIA) continues to be acknowledged both internationally and in the U.K. The recent announcement of the award of an EPSRC Future blood testing for inclusive monitoring and personalised analytics network’ grant cited OIA’s role as a key partner, “essential in an interdisciplinary remote blood-testing monitoring network”. The EPSRC is the funding arm for Engineering and Physical Scientific research in the U.K.
The project funded by the grant, spearheaded by Dr. Weizi Li, Deputy Director of the Informatics Research Centre at the Henley Business School, University of Reading, aims to explore solutions that will enable patients and health professionals to carry out their blood tests remotely, greatly accelerating decision-making, the processing of blood samples, and the delivery of diagnoses, all of which have been made more urgent than ever by Covid-19.
Clinical healthcare continues to face challenges in obtaining and processing blood samples outside of clinical platforms, and reducing labour-intensive and manual tweaking, which are not suited for home blood monitoring. All of these factors significantly hamper the timely analysis of blood samples. Capturing patients’ sequential data over time to compile information crucial to the early detection of complex diseases has been identified as the only way to manage chronic health conditions.
In the U.K., more than 500 million biochemistry and 130 haematology tests are conducted annually, with 95% of clinical pathways requiring patients to have access to timely, cost-effective pathology services. Inefficient handling of blood testing and analysis translates into inefficient and late diagnoses of many illnesses, and to opportunities lost due to a lack of knowledge of disease progression and the many attendant health complications.
The interdisciplinary network will look at the entire spectrum of blood testing technologies to “raise awareness, generate big ideas, and highlight blood testing solutions for remote, inclusive, rapid, affordable and personalised blood monitoring”. The network’s formation signals a shift in the healthcare industry and acknowledges deficits in the current health system. The network will explore three principal areas: remote monitoring, I.C.T., and personalised data and A.I. to monitor diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, general and pre-operative care.
The EPSRC aims to maintain the U.K.’s leading position in research and training by providing opportunities for researchers to collaborate. Partners in the network include Stanford University, Cambridge University Hospitals, M.I.T., Karolinska Institute, and the Imperial College London.
Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA) is an award-winning Bio and MedTech company incubated by the University of Oxford with a mission to rid the world of preventable diseases. It operates multi-nationally to build technology that moves healthcare away from its reliance on population-wide symptom pattern matching toward value-based precision medicine and personalised diagnostics.