Lord O’Shaughnessy has been asked to make recommendations to the UK Government to make the UK a more attractive jurisdiction in which to conduct commercial clinical trials. AI technologies present one of the most exciting opportunities to radically accelerate the development of novel therapies and medical technologies. Exscientia reported that the results of the EXALT1 clinical trial had demonstrated that AI-mediated functional precision oncology can improve patient outcome in a prospective interventional trial. AI was used to analyse biopsies of each patient’s “normal” and cancer cells to seek to identify a medicine (or combination of medicines) that might work for each patient. This involved dividing the cells into numerous individual samples, each of which was exposed to various medicines (and combinations of medicines) and monitoring each sample using robotic automation and computer vision, which in turn used ML models trained to identify small changes in the cells in response to the medicines.
