COMBAT SERIOUS ILLNESS WITH AI: The AMGEN Approach

Healthcare is undergoing a significant change in Singapore.  The catalyst is new technologies; which can gauge probability of illness and attempt to formulate a way to fight diseases.  That approach contrasts with standard care, which treats an illness after it occurs instead of trying to fight it beforehand.  One thing’s for certain: Predictive care is getting a second look.

New technologies such as artificial intelligence could prove “hugely important to humanity”, says Steve Leonard, Chief Executive of SGInnovate, a government-owned company that funds deep tech startups. He believes that Singapore is poised on the cusp of a healthcare AI revolution; in the near future, intelligent digital tools will help doctors and nurses speed up diagnoses and pick out trends and patterns.

Amgen based in USA is changing how AI is innovating predictive care.  Amgen is the world’s largest independent biotechnology company, is at the forefront of this change.  The company is combining life sciences with data analytics to help tackle serious illnesses like cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Recently at the Aspen Ideas summit: Health in Colorado, Amgen discussed ways its Digital Health & Innovation (DH&I) team is using advanced data analytics techniques like artificial intelligence to solve problems for patients.  
Amgen is a company that uses cutting-edge science and technology to study the subtlest biological mechanisms in search of therapies that will improve the lives of those who suffer from serious diseases.  Amgen believes the cure for disease can be found inside each and every one of us.  See what they have been up to below:

1. Boosting the accuracy of risk predictions.

In the U.S., half of all women over the age of 50 will have an osteoporosis-related bone break in her lifetime.Yet less than half of all patients with osteoporosis are ever diagnosed, and just 25 percent ever receive treatment.Leveraging historical data already on file, Amgen is attempting to address this gap with two calls to action: 1) reduce the risk prediction window from 10 to two years; 2) drive increased awareness of near-term facture risk to support appropriate osteoporosis diagnosis for patients.
 
Amgen built a sequential neural network, capable of learning order dependence in sequence prediction problems.These approaches, inspired from state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms, have shown relevance to healthcare applications in recent research.The models learned “fingerprints” of patients in a latent vector space to estimate sequences more commonly associated with facture patients and used a tree-based model to predict risk.Together, the neural network and sequence prediction have shown promising early results in predicting imminent fractures from the historical data set.
 

1. Making patient care more intuitive.

It’s no secret that healthcare in the U.S. is in need of change.This $3.5 trillion industry has not yet been disrupted.In Singapore the healthcare system requires an up lift on implementing AI too.
 

1. Using data to determine the most effective treatment for individual patients.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a rare, complex blood cancer with no known cure, and represents just two percent of all cancers.Many patients receiving the diagnosis have never heard of this incurable disease but have to learn quickly to map out treatment options with an oncologist or hematologist.
 
Amgen is now striving to arm clinicians with insights into the patient response of different therapies, thereby improving patient outcomes throughout the treatment journey.Amgen has partnered with GNS Healthcare (a US-based company), which specializes in analyzing both clinical trial and real-world data to model patient response to treatment using artificial intelligence and Bayesian modeling to play out different “what if” scenarios.
 

1. Supporting compliance via real-time answers.

Internally, Amgen is using AI to drive activities across the company with an eye for improving how it operates and fulfills its mission to serve patients.Specifically, it’s using technology to support one of its core tenets: do the right thing.In an industry where patients are involved, there is no room for error.
 
Amgen recognized that by pushing the boundaries of advanced text recognition, artificial intelligence could be used to provide real-time answers to questions related to compliance and regulations.Collaborating with Avata Intelligence, a leader in AI for enterprise-level solutions, Amgen created ASK, an application that uses AI and natural language processing to provide fast answers with accuracy, consistency, and confidence.
 
“At Amgen, our mission is to serve patients.We’re proud to be leading the way in biotechnology with advanced data analytic techniques and emerging technology solutions to help bring about this overdue transformation for patient,” said Patrick Dey, vice president of Digital Health & Innovation at Amgen.
 
Learn more about how Amgen is building a better biotech at www.amgen.com .