NEW YORK – BC Platforms said Tuesday that it has entered into a collaboration with Japanese research institute Riken and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (known by Finnish acronym THL) to build a predictive model to identify people's risk for contracting COVID-19.
The organizations will work together to apply artificial intelligence in an effort to understand genomic and phenotypic associations with the infectious disease. They will seek to determine why and how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is deadly for some patients and not others.
This effort will apply AI-based disease stratification algorithms from Riken to samples and data from COVID-19-positive patients in Finland within THL's national COVIDprog research project. BC Platforms will offer its BC|Insight data collection platform to curate, integrate, and analyze clinical data from as many as 1,000 COVIDprog participants.
"Our hope is, together, we will gain insights into exactly who is at risk from COVID-19, and why, at a molecular/genetic level, so society can better allocate resources to those who most need them to survive the pandemic," Markus Perola, leader of the COVIDprog research at THL, said in a statement.
"Systematic data sharing in a safe and secure manner is crucial in our fight against COVID-19," added BC Platforms CEO Tero Silvola. "We are looking forward to working with Riken to make this AI prediction platform available to other healthcare systems in order to help them to fight the COVID-19 pandemic."