Boehringer Ingelheim, Lifebit Partner to Advance Biomedical Data

Boehringer Ingelheim and precision medicine software company Lifebit Biotech recently partnered to build a scalable data, analytics, and infrastructure platform to unlock the transformation value of biomedical data.

The companies will leverage Lifebit’s secure CloudOS platform. Several research organizations and governments currently use the platform, including Genomics England and The Hong Kong Genome Project.

The platform brings analytics and computing tools to the data rather than moving sensitive data around. The overall promise is to emphasize the value of biomedical data by enabling seamless integration with population genomics and disease-focused cohorts.

Additionally, Lifebit’s CloudOS will provide powerful analytic capabilities and global biobank connections to build a secure “dataland” for analytics and research.

“This platform will play an important part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s broader strategy to capture translational disease insights from large external healthcare biobanks and ultimately to accelerate the development of innovative medicines,” Jan Nygaard Jensen, MD, SVP and global head of computational biology and digital sciences at Boehringer Ingelheim, said in the announcement.

“Lifebit’s transformational solutions and services will provide standardization of data sources and types, data curation, identification of data and services that could be migrated to the cloud, and federating data connectivity with third parties,” Jensen continued.

The recent collaboration furthers Boehringer Ingelheim and Lifebit Biotech’s partnership, first established in June 2021.

Last year, Boehringer Ingelheim and Lifebit Biotech partnered to utilize natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to detect global disease outbreaks harvested from scientific publications and other sources.

Scientists and researchers from both companies combined real-world evidence and the latest AI algorithms to identify infectious disease outbreaks, such as transboundary disease spread or COVID-19, and respond accordingly.

Over 500 million tweets, three million news articles, and thousands of scientific papers are published daily. Therefore, it is challenging for decision-makers to collate meaningful insights that are both useful and actionable.

Lifebit’s system combines precision data harvesting techniques with AI algorithms to identify data signals and alleviate these difficulties.