Oxford, U.K., December 3, 2021: Sensyne Health plc, the ethical Clinical AI company, has signed a five-year, non-exclusive Strategic Research Agreement ("SRA”) with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (“CUH” or the “Trust”). The agreement will enable the ethical application of clinical AI research by analyzing de-identified patient records in order to carry out research with the potential of providing new understanding and treatments for various diseases.

The partnership will cover research across the Trust’s areas of disease expertise and specialism in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and rare diseases. These are vital areas of research which CUH wants to support to provide equitable access to diagnosis and treatment for its patient population, while also helping address future national and international health challenges.

Cancer research will be a key focus of the strategic research partnership and Sensyne will use its expertise to analyze cancer patient pathways to reduce patient waiting times and improve patient care. Additionally, under the SRA, Sensyne and CUH will focus on the following areas:

Clinical decision tools to support patient care, by developing and validating the effectiveness of new AI-enabled software tools to help clinicians analyze complex data sets to improve clinical decision making;

The use of AI for the analysis of retrospective clinical data, and the generation of synthetic control arms to support clinical trials more effectively, accelerating the process of drug development for patients; and

Drug discovery, by helping to discover new medicines aimed at treating rare as well as common diseases, including cardiovascular disease and cancers.

The CUH dataset covers three million unique patient records, with approximately one million patient contacts per year from a patient population of approximately five million people. This new Strategic Research Agreement takes the number of Sensyne’s SRAs with NHS Trusts and US health systems to 16, and brings the combined total of de-identified patient data directly accessible for medical research to 25.5 million patients (12.1 million in UK and 13.4 million patients in the US, with an additional 22 million available in the US through Sensyne’s teaming agreement with OMNY Health).

Dr Ashley Shaw, CUH Medical Director, said: “At CUH we use a wide range of research to constantly improve the lives of patients both locally and around the world. Sitting at the heart of Europe’s biggest life sciences campus, alongside some of the world’s most pre-eminent academics and industrial partners, we know the power of collaborations to bring about discoveries that will benefit us all. By searching large de-identified datasets, machine learning tools can spot patterns which are otherwise indiscernible, shedding light on causes of disease and opening up new treatment opportunities.”

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