Mayo Clinic Expands Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Diagnostics Partnership

Mayo Clinic and healthcare diagnostics company Numares Health announced an expansion of their partnership focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled diagnostic testing for patients with chronic diseases, including kidney, liver, cardiovascular, and neurological conditions.

According to the press release, the expanded collaboration builds on Mayo Clinic’s existing clinical research funding and support for Numares Health with a convertible equity investment. With this support, Numares is developing diagnostic testing for conditions related to metabolic dysfunction using a machine-learning (ML) modality.

Using this AI-enabled modality, Numares can use algorithms combining multiple biomarkers to accurately measure chronic disease progression. The diagnostics developed as a result are designed to improve testing and allow early intervention to slow disease progression and improve patient care, the press release states.

"The Mayo Clinic mission has always been that the needs of the patient come first," said Allan Jaffe, MD,  cardiologist and former chair of Mayo Clinic's division of clinical core laboratory services in the department of laboratory medicine and pathology, in a press release. "The expanded research collaboration and financial investment in Numares will help us further understand this new and potentially disruptive test modality, develop new diagnostic tests and enable Mayo Clinic to better serve our patients and physicians."

The collaboration will also help support additional clinical developments.

"The new investment accelerates our development pipeline and drives research collaborations that fulfill critical unmet medical needs with new clinical utility,” said Winton Gibbons, Numares' CEO, in the press release. “With the additional investment, we've enhanced our ability to target our focus on delivering this patient care technology to U.S. physicians as an improved diagnostic tool for their use."

The expansion follows the announcement of a collaboration between Numares and Mayo Clinic Laboratories in 2019.

Under that agreement, the two worked together to develop clinical diagnostic tests to measure clusters of risk factors, as opposed to individual biomarkers, using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology. The partnership was focused on cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver cancer, and a few others.

Mayo Clinic has also recently formed and expanded other partnerships to leverage data science and AI to enhance patient care.

In July, Mayo Clinic announced a 10-year strategic partnership with Mercy, which is set to use data science and deidentified patient outcomes to determine effective disease prevention and treatment. Under the collaboration, the two organizations will pull more than a decade’s worth of deidentified clinical data and treatment outcomes, which were too unstructured and complex to analyze until now, from integrated EHRs.