 OIA has been accepted into the 'CDL-recovery' programme in Atlanta, U.S. with the purpose to explore the U.S. market and contribute to the world recovery during and after COVID-19. Particularly chosen by the Creative Destruction Lab because of our solution's potential to contribute to the challenge of remote health monitoring, OIA and Algocyte are in a privileged position to help medical professionals and patients, specially those with conditions neglected because of the pandemic.
OIA chose Atlanta as its CDL affiliation to explore an incursion into the U.S. and North American markets from a world healthcare hub city. The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is a programme for massively scalable, science-based companies that pairs founders with experienced entrepreneurs and investors to set focused, measurable objectives with the goal of maximising equity-value creation. CDL was founded in 2012 in Toronto, Canada by Prof. Ajay Agrawal. Most global healthcare resources are focused on COVID19 and this is largely disrupting the continuum of care for patients with chronic diseases (Chudasama et al., 2020). It has been reported that fear of contacting GPs during the COVID19 outbreak may be fuelling missed diagnoses (The Guardian, 2020). Results from a poll by NHS England, released in April, revealed that 40% of people said they were avoiding contacting their GP because of concerns about burdening the NHS (GPOnline, 2020). “During a pandemic, other health conditions do not cease to exist, and we’ve seen from health crises in the past that there are sometimes more deaths from conditions unrelated to the pandemic than the virus causing the pandemic itself” Many patients with chronic medical conditions or those undergoing diagnostic or therapeutic procedures require regular blood tests. This is currently performed at a hospital, clinic or GP's surgery, or in some cases through a visit by a phlebotomist or a district nurse to the patient’s home. Consequently, the requirement for self-isolation and social distancing during the pandemic has resulted in many patients being unable to receive an optimal level of monitoring. Even in non-pandemic times, the current system of contact-based blood testing is very inefficient and wasteful of precious NHS resources. There is consensus amongst healthcare providers that remote patient consultations could be very effective, and are very desirable, but are hampered by the need for contact-based blood testing (Royal College of Physicians, 2018). There is also an additional, and more fundamental, problem with how we monitor patient blood results. Blood results are reported based on a binary category of normal or abnormal in comparison with population reference values. However, unsurprisingly, the population ‘normal’ ranges are generally very wide. A crude and simplistic binary categorisation of blood results often implies that even when a patient’s blood values move dramatically within the normal reference values, clinicians can dismiss this change if it remains within the range considered to be healthy. Unquestionably, however, significant rapid changes, for example in total White Blood Cell (WBC) count, are likely to have been precipitated by biologically and potentially medically-consequential causes which are currently ignored. There is now strong evidence that even when all other known factors are taken into consideration, changes in immune cell numbers such as WBC count are predictive of risk of disease and death, even in entirely healthy people (Shah et al., 2017; Alpert et al., 2019). In this context, personalised and longitudinal monitoring of a person’s immune system with a tool like Algocyte®, has the potential to generate important insights into health and disease, particularly in the case of vulnerable patients.
Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA) aims to support the health care sector and the NHS with Algocyte®, a service that allows clinicians to remotely monitor their patients' health and immune systems through a Full Blood Count (and possible complementary blood tests). As part of OIA’s partnership with the NHS, OIA is currently offering service contracts to NHS organisations without charge in order to maximise the patient and societal benefits of this remote blood testing service and help with the increasing demand and accumulated backlog during the pandemic. To this end, we invite organisations to contact us with a description of how immune cell monitoring can help your patients. If appropriate, this service will be subsidised 100% by OIA. Currently, OIA is running pilots at Addenbrooke's Cambridge University Hospitals and the Medici GP Practice (15,000 patients) in Luton. Millions could be putting their long-term health at risk by not getting the proper monitoring that their conditions need (UniteLive, 2020) and we believe we are in a position to help. Please contact us by completing the short form at the end of the page: References:
 Sinldo Information Technology Co., Ltd. based in Beijing, is a leading Hospital Information Technology and mobile healthcare solution provider in China. It covers over 1,000 major public hospitals (400+ Grade A/Class A), 2000 community hospital and medical institutions, with over 600 million patient visits per year.
Sinldo has connected more than 1.5 million doctors and helps to manage 200 million patients each year. The letter of intent outlines the terms of conditions of a commercial agreement and involves the introduction and commercialisation of Algocyte in the regional hospital network in Shanxi province, An Kang city, Han Bin district, in China where there are 3 hospitals in the city, 36 community hospitals and 400 medical units in the surrounding villages which are connected by Sinldo’s digital platform that covers 1,020,000 people. Signed by Dr Hongqiao Yang Sinldo, Chairman of Sinldo, the letter also establishes a further exploration of a wider adoption of Algocyte in hospital networks across China including 3000 regional hospitals and other medical units. We asked patients and doctors and this is what they said
Patients
Patients found that getting a regular appointment for a blood test was too long (at least a week on average)
which together with the time they had to wait for their blood test results amounted to up to two more weeks in total.
A majority of patients say yes to finger-pricking over the alternatives
Patients find useful the main features of Algocyte.
PractitionersThe number of tests and hours that doctors and nurses request and spend on blood testing is significant   Doctors found that they spend several hours a week that could be rather spent on other activities and save appointment enabled by the responsible AI-powered capabilities of Algocyte, including providing more time and greater quality of care to patients.
 There was a clear consensus on time-saving and usefulness of results and analytics in a remote app and solution for rapid remote blood testing.
* Data collected from a survey independently conducted and answered by 28 people including doctors (all levels), paramedics, nurses, and patients by the Medici Medical Centre clinic in Luton on June 11, 2020, a GP practice with over 15,000 patients.
OIA's CTO Dr. Jürgen Riedel and Senior AI Researcher Dr. Santiago Hernández-Orozco deliver a technical invited talk at the international conference AUTOMATA 2020, the 26th International Workshop on Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems, one of the most reputable conferences in the field.
Jürgen and Santiago explained some of the most fundamental technical aspects behind OIA's A.I. and Machine Learning approaches to transform medicine from simple statistical pattern-matching to causal diagnostics and how OIA's methods and technology gives OIA an edge when it comes to robustness (e.g. to perturbations and interventions), generalisation (over-fitting avoidance) and explainability in what we call a responsible A.I. approach to applications in healthcare. According to a survey from London venture capital firm MMC, 40% of European startups that are classified as A.I. companies don't actually use artificial intelligence in a way that is “material” to their businesses. Another percentage are startups or companies that adopt AI, but very few innovate in AI as much as in its domain of application like OIA does with its group of AI leaders and pioneers. Here are some of OIA's most recent papers in some of the top journals in the fields of AI, automata and molecular biology research:
Found in a strategic location at the Sheraton House, Castle Park only a few minutes walking from the city centre of Cambridge, the new OIA office and lab will be OIA's second location joining our headquarters' office at Davidson House in Reading. OIA Cambridge will have the main purpose to support the haematology and oncology department at Addenbrooke's Hospital, one of the largest and most reputable hospitals and cancer research hubs in the UK and Europe with whom OIA has signed a collaboration and commercial agreement. With this office, OIA will be in a position to launch and extend a premium service covering most of the Golden Triangle.
 Oxford Immune Algorithmics is sponsoring the 26th International Workshop on Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems AUTOMATA 2020. The conference aims to:
AUTOMATA 2020 will focus on the theory and applications that many of OIA's own proprietary methods are based upon, in the deep connections of discrete dynamical systems complexity theory and algorithmic information. There will be special sessions and tutorials led by OIA's members on Automata in Machine Learning and on Algorithmic Information Dynamics with a particular interest in aspects of computability in causation, AI and reprogrammability. This shows again OIA's commitment to bridge industry and academia.
We are thrilled to announce that Oxford Immune Algorithmics signed last week a collaboration and commercial agreement with the National Health Service in the UK to serve and continue co-developing Algocyte® in Addenbrooke's Hospital at the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, one of the most important hospitals in the UK.
Algocyte® will be deployed at the Department of Paediatric Haematology, Oncology and Palliative Care to help paediatric cancer patients to get supportive monitoring while preventing them to visit the hospital where they are exposed to greater risk of infection due to COVID-19. We want to thank partners, collaborators and investors that made this possible believing in us and supporting our project to help clinicians and these vulnerable patients.
We are happy to announce that Oxford Immune Algorithmics has been nominated to the OBN awards for the Best Start-up Medtech in the UK. The awards celebrate outstanding achievement throughout the life sciences industry.
OBN is the not-for-profit organisation supporting and bringing together the UK’s life sciences companies, corporate partners and investors. Their 400-plus Member companies are located across the Golden Triangle (Oxford, London and Cambridge) and beyond to Manchester, Nottingham, the Midlands, South Coast and Scotland. The nomination already feels like winning and we are very grateful to OBN for this prestigious nomination.   OIA has become a sponsor and will join CogX 2020 as an exhibitor with a dedicated virtual booth. CogX is the Festival of AI and Emerging Technology and will take place on the 8th-10th June 2020. CogX has gone
Traditionally held in London, CogX 2020 is going Virtual and has become a pop-up 3-day 36 channel online TV network with a Virtual Expo. They expect to beat their audience target and provide even greater connections to everyone involved. I hope you find you at our virtual booth at CogX 2020! Our chief medical officer and coo explain the clinical need and demo algocyte (lancelot version)14/5/2020
   OIA has been awarded a grant by recommendation of the Foundational Questions Institute & Fetzer Franklin Fund, a donor advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The FQXi catalyses, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality. The mission of the Fetzer Franklin Fund is to explore the frontiers of scientific knowledge and to advance breakthroughs towards scientific views of reality that are integrated and relational. the Fetzer Franklin Fund focuses on foundational questions at the frontiers of physics, biology, and consciousness research. The Fund supports work that re-examines the foundations of science, including scientific methodologies for both conventional and frontier research. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is the largest regional grant maker in the United States and was conceived to advance innovative philanthropic solutions to challenging problems, engaging donors to make the world a better place for all and  Our CEO, Dr. Hector Zenil, will be delivering the opening Keynote at the Predictive Analytics World summit on May 11, 2020 originally planned to be held in Munich, Germany but now to be held online. He will be talking about Responsible AI in Health Care and Medicine, our research at the forefront of science at OIA and our approach with Algocyte®. Other speakers include Dr. Anna Bauer-Mehren, Head of Data Science at Roche; and Dr. Joran Lookerbol, Director of the Centre for Machine Learning at the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health.   We are sponsors, again, of the Intelligent Health summit where Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, OIA's Chief Medical Officer, will make a major announcement introducing Project Lancelot, OIA and Algocyte's response to Covid-19 (or its consequences) with our remote health monitoring cutting-edge technology for which OIA was created and we now finds itself in the middle of a pandemic being able to make an important contribution to the challenges posed by the crisis.   Pictures from the previous Intelligent Health summit earlier in 2020 at the ExCel conference centre in London (today, unfortunately, converted into the Nightingale's Hospital because of Covid-19, almost overnight becoming one of the largest hospitals in the world)
   We have successfully closed our latest funding round with SFC and KIN Capital leading it, award winning investors, both joining last week our multinational shareholder's board supporting OIA.
This is a major milestone as other startups and companies find it increasingly difficult to find funding in a time of crisis. We are very proud to have SFC and KIN joining OIA's journey and for the trust placed on us by investors of this calibre, it feels very much like validation of what we have been doing in the last 1.5 years developing Algocyte®. We are thrilled that SFC and KIN have seen value in OIA even (or especially) in times like a pandemic. Their investment will help us respond to the increasing interest we are seeing in our services from the NHS. We will now start our next funding round and it is already looking very promising as we are in advanced talks with some of the largest and greatest VCs in the UK.  According to the organisers, STHLM TECH is the largest startup event in Europe where every geek, hacker, entrepreneur, investor, and designer around Stockholm comes together under one roof. In this edition, there were 3 special guests announced, including leading investors from Canada and Holland. Omers is behind many of the top startups from Canada including Shopify, and DuckDuckGo. Originally planned to be held at the Hilton Slussen in Stockholm, the event was streamed live from live.sthlmtech.com on Monday 6 April, 2020. Representing OIA was Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, our Chief Medical Officer, who gave a great pitch about Algocyte® for which we received useful feedback from investors and organisers who were very optimistic about our approach and business model. There were around 140 attendants and more than 50 of them voted for the best company pitch:  OIA's Algocyte® pitch won by a large percentage (82%) against two other great startups, and we got very useful feedback from top investors.
 Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA), like almost every other company and organisation around the world is putting in place contingency plans to downsize operations and send people home to work remotely while trying to be the least disruptive in the development and evolution of our products and goals.
We believe that the current situation is a challenge but also an opportunity. We believe that the current crisis will help humanity better rank priorities, realise that these events can happen and may become the norm if this new family of virus becomes seasonal with different degrees of disruption. We can acknowledge how unprepared was the world to face this challenge and how important would have been to have the means to monitor people's health remotely. Indeed, during a crisis like this one patients are asked to avoid coming to hospitals and surgeries even if they are seriously ill yet unable to get care because of risk of infection. This doesn't have to happen with Algocyte®. OIA has been working on Algocyte® for almost 2 years and has now a full end-to-end CE Marked (under the CE Medical Device directive) app for remote blood testing and health monitoring that can help with these situations and may even save lives by enabling medical doctors to provide coverage without risk of infection for the health professional or the patient. We are certain that OIA and Algocyte® will become thus even more relevant because we had our priorities right and we knew this was something the world requires to better handle medical emergencies and, in general, regular patient monitoring. If our vision resonates with your and you believe that we can make a difference as a health or medical professional to your organisation or practice please contact us at changetheworld@immunealgorithmics.com  Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA) has been chosen one of 50 game-changers in the Thames Valley (UK's Silicon Valley) for the creation of Algocyte and our responsible AI approaches awarded by ConnectTVT supported by Deloitte UK, Reading University's Henley Business School, BDB Pitmas and Austin Fraser. The Thames Valley has the greatest concentration of IT companies in the UK covering the region to the West of London from Swindon to Slough including Oxford and Reading. Other companies with headquarters in Reading and the area include Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, DEC, HP, Vodafone, NaturalMotion, Nanopore, among many others. OIA has been chosen for 'pushing the boundaries with innovation' for its Algocyte platform and solution, the accredited (CE as a medical device), most portable, and sophisticated remote blood testing solution for health monitoring available. Representing OIA were Kim, Jürgen (CTO and co-founder) and Santiago.  Our Press Release is available here: 
SUCCESSFUL RELEASE PRESENTATION OF ALGOCYTE VERSION 1 AT INTELLIGENT HEALTH 2020 UK IN LONDON8/2/2020
With over 1000 attendants at London's largest event venue, the Excel, the sold-out Intelligent Health 2020 event was a success and OIA/Algocyte was one of the featured sponsors where we introduced and promoted our remote blood testing and health monitoring innovative solution. Attending from OIA were Ago Forcella (COO), Ed Sant'Anna (Chief Strategist), Steeve Tchatchuing and Ines Amri (Business Associates).
Oxford Immune Algorithmics (OIA) is very proud to have partnered with the University of Reading and welcomes two of their students in Computer Science hired with the partial support of the University of Reading internship scheme and grant. OIA is engaged with the local community and the young people of Reading where OIA's headquarters are located.  We are very excited to share the announcement that we have accomplished a major milestone getting Algocyte® certified under the European Commission medical device directive. Algocyte® is OIA's flagship product, an end-to-end app and solution for remote blood testing and health monitoring based on our proprietary technology (two patents pending no. 1918950.5 and 1918948.9 (UK)).
OIA will be exhibiting at one of the world’s leading summits on AI in medicine, Intelligent Health 2020 on 5 February 2020 at a prime venue, the ExCel, London, U.K. where we will be promoting Algocyte, our flagship product for end-to-end remote blood testing and health monitoring.   Promoted and streamed online worldwide and to the Austin Vita offices in Germany and the U.S., as advertised locally in Reading's giant screen at the train station, six speakers welcomed 80 attendants in an interesting evening to talk about what kind of AI and what type of ethics and responsibilities are there behind AI adoption in healthcare. Instead of only poling more positive pile to AI, the level of discussion in the event was very high and the kind of discussion we would like to see more often.
On the pictures above are our meeting ad on the giant screen followed by Dr. Hector Zenil (CEO of OIA) talk on the challenges and limitations of AI in healthcare and Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy (CMO of OIA) leading the panel discussion on AI in healthcare with panelists Prof. Slawomir Nasuto, and Dr. Weizi Li from the University of Reading, and Geoff Keeling from Ethical Reading and the University of Bristol and the University Cambridge. The event was sponsored by Austin Vita and co-organised by Ethical Reading. Bringing people interested in closing the gap between academia and industry together, and in cutting-edge science and technology solutions, we at Oxford Immune Algorithmics with Austin Fraser and Austin Vita are organising the AI in Healthcare event. Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, video invitation to our event 'AI in Healthcare' At OIA we believe that automation is not about replacing humans but about scaling intelligence (machine and human) to help healthcare organisations and medical professionals to deal with real human challenges today, such as:
New technologies that harness artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) present huge opportunities to transform healthcare, improve the quality of people, and help health professionals.  Followed by an introduction on the ‘limitations, challenges and the future of AI’ by Dr. Hector Zenil (Karolinska Institute, Karolinska Hospital and Oxford Immune Algorithmics), a panel discussion on ‘AI in healthcare’ will be moderated by Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy (Reader of Transplantation at the University of Cambridge, NHS surgeon and Chief Medical Officer of Oxford Immune Algorithmics). Our panelists are experts in the UK in the areas of healthcare and AI, from government, industry and academia. The discussion will centre around the following questions:
Panelists Dr. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy is Chief Medical Officer at Oxford Immune Algorithmics Ltd. MD & PhD in Neurosciences (Cambridge), NHS Transplant Surgeon, a University Reader & Leader of his own lab at the University of Cambridge (specialised in immunogenicity of regenerative cellular therapies) has over 15 years experience in biotech companies, director of the Cambridge In Vivo Assessment Platform & the Cambridge Biorepository for Translational Medicine. Prof. Slawomir Nasuto is a Deputy Research Lead of the Biomedical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering Research Division within the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading. Prof Nasuto heads the Brain Embodiment Laboratory, an interdisciplinary facility within the School of Biological Sciences comprising two experimental laboratories performing research in Brain Computer Interfaces and cell cultures, and using complex systems science approaches to characterise the resulting data. His research on phase synchronisation, functional connectivity and complex evolving networks informs, and in turn benefits from, interrogating cognitive processes and more directly nervous system. He is interested in the use of BCI and neurofeedback for therapeutic applications and to affect human behaviour, as well as wider applications of complex systems science, swarm intelligence and machine learning to uncover complex relationships hidden within data. He published over 180 research articles in books, journals and international peer-reviewed conferences in the related areas. Geoff Keeling is a Research Assistant at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. He is also a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Bristol. Geoff is interested in the ethics of artificial intelligence, and how we can make ethical decisions when we are uncertain about the consequences of our actions. His talk examines what informed consent might look like in a future containing artificial doctors, and considers the implications for algorithmic decision-making in other areas such as finance and advertising. Dr. Weizi (Vicky) Li, is Associate Professor of Informatics and Digital Health, Deputy Director in Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading. Her research focuses on digital health, integrated system, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in healthcare. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of IT (FBCS). Her research of integrated clinical pathway system has been successfully commercialised and she has been scientific advisor of the company who provide mobile healthcare and data platform for 3000 hospitals in China. Her research impact of improving healthcare quality and efficiency using data platform and AI is recognised as one of winners of O2RB Excellence in Impact Awards in 2018, supported by University of Oxford Economic Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account. Her research with NHS on “Applications and Implications of Machine Learning: Understanding and Predicting Healthcare Resource Usage and Patient Risk for Improved Population Engagement” has been awarded Economic Social Research Council grant in 2018. Her other research projects in healthcare are funded by private companies, NHS and Innovate UK. Speakers Dr. Hector Zenil is a mathematician and holds degrees in Logic (MPhil, Paris), Computer Science (PhD, Lille), & Logic & Epistemology (PhD, Paris). He has over 20 years experience in academia & industry. An authority in complexity & causality with over 100 papers published as a Senior researcher & faculty member of the University of Oxford, & as lab leader at the Karolinska Institute (awarding institution of the Nobel Prize in Medicine). He has over 100 paper in the top journals of DNA research, machine intelligence, bioinformatics, physics and complexity. Dr Jurgen Riedel is a physicist (PhD, Germany) with interests in and contributions to classical field theory, quantum gravity, & cellular automata. Member of the board of directors of the scientific Paris-based lab LABORES & its Algorithmic Nature Group. He has over 20 years experience in Business Intelligence, data visualisation & data science working for large companies such as UBS, Citibank, Volkswagen, & Eon. Venue In a prime location next to Reading’s rail station at the Thames Tower (floor 12), Reading RG1 1LX (30 min from Oxford and 25 min from London's Paddington by train) By train, the venue is literally 1 min away from Reading’s rail station. By car, you can park at the NCP rail station parking place and other parking facilities around in the city centre at a discounted (and very cheap) price after 6 PM (behind the Thames Tower building). REGISTRATION Please sign up for free at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-in-healthcare-tickets-79127214629 (limited to only 150 people) The event will be streamed to the U.S. and Germany. Our CTO, Dr. Jürgen Riedel, invites the German crowd |
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Oxford Immune Algorithmics
Oxford Immune Algorithmics