IIT Mandi and US-based RxDataScience Tie-up to Create Portal Documenting AI & ML Research in Pharma Sector
Premier tech institute Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi located in Himachal Pradesh, has join hands with RxDataScience Inc, a US-based healthcare-focussed big data analytics software firm, to create a portal documentation Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research in the pharmaceutical sector.
A team of IIT Mandi will also work closely with RxDataScience Inc, to apply deep-learning methods and cognitive algorithms for discovering patterns among patient journeys and social ties among physicians. This is part of a long-term collaboration focused on performing machine-learning on healthcare datasets concerning patients and physicians and developing novel web-based visualizations.
“Data Sciences in India are at a very nascent stage yet but in the US, most healthcare and pharmaceutical companies have moved onto the consulting stage wherein live cases are debated online by the doctors and medical practitioners’ community,” said Prof. Varun Dutt, assistant professor, school of computing and electrical engineering, IIT Mandi, while explaining the importance of collaboration with RxDataScience.
India is at the helm of a healthcare boom given that the Government of India has hiked in health spending by 11 per cent with a gross budgetary allocation of Rs. 1,200 crores for opening more hospitals.
“State-of-the-art infrastructure on ground can help only when off ground data science evolves and put the registers and medical charts online up for discussion with other doctors. IIT Mandi is pleased to work with such a nodal agency in the healthcare sector the world over and this puts India on the world map of healthcare mapping online,” said Prof. Dutt further.
Expressing happiness at this collaboration, Mr. Larry Pickett, Chief Executive Officer, RxDataScience Inc., said, “The RxDataScience and IIT Mandi research collaboration has been extremely productive in generating innovative new algorithms and visualization tools using the latest AI and machine learning approaches applied to longitudinal patient data. Both patients and our biopharma clients benefit from insights generated using novel approaches with cognitive and decision sciences applied to patient finding, patient journey and other complex use cases. We are excited to continue our long-term partnership with Dr. Varun Dutt and the PhD and undergraduate students at IIT Mandi.”
A good number of pharmaceutical giants across the world are eyeing India to tap the vast number of patients’ records and data, which can be mined through AI, ML for predictive analysis. American pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer and FITT (Foundation of Innovation and Technology Transfer) at IIT-Delhi, have already joined hands for Pfizer IIT Delhi Innovation and IP Program (PIDIIP), designed to provide funding, resources, expertise and infrastructure to healthcare startups and Individual innovators across India
To recall, in April this year, Swiss multinational healthcare firm Roche too announced that it is looking for startups in India that will help the company bring evidence-based medicine in India through its proprietary technology.
To recall, tech giant Google is also working on an AI-driven tool called ‘Google Brain’, in which it has developed a data processing pipeline for transforming electronic health record (EHR) files into a standardized format. Moreover, very recently an undergraduate from IIT, Kanpur, made India proud by bagging the fellowship of Google Brain.
Source: IndianWeb2
