November 4, 2015
Aridhia, the Edinburgh-based clinical informatics company, announced today that their AnalytiXagility data platform has been chosen to underpin a three year research programme that was awarded Innovate UK funding via the Neurodegenerative Diseases: Business Models and Big Data competition, following a joint bid by three of Northern Ireland’s leading organisations.
The resulting Moneta Research project – led by Asystec Data Solutions, the University of Ulster and the Clinical Translational Research and Innovation Centre (C-TRIC) – will use the funding to support their research into identifying people most likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
The collaborative project will apply ‘beyond’ state-of-the-art computational analysis and modelling to a large biological and clinical dataset of Alzheimer’s patients, and will bring together clinical research skills from the across the University and C-TRIC with analytics expertise from Asystec to collaboratively build predictive models that can be used to estimate the likely probability of currently healthy patients developing a major neurodegenerative disorder like Alzheimer’s.
Chris Roche, CEO at Aridhia said, “We are delighted that the collaboration have chosen AnalytiXagility as the platform for Moneta Research. Asystec have made great strides in the last twelve months with the data services they offer. Winning this award in collaboration with the University of Ulster, in such an important area of research, is a real boost for Northern Ireland and demonstates Asystec’s continued leadership in bringing data innovation to Ireland.”
The project will utilise the new state-of-the-art functional brain mapping facility at the University of Ulster to create an enhanced dataset, based on imaging data, which can then be utilised to increase the accuracy of the predictive model.
Working with such datasets requires a cutting-edge data platform and Aridhia are delighted that AnalytiXagility has been chosen to enable the collaborative analysis of the project’s large complex and heterogeneous datasets, which include demographics, medical history, neuropsychology scores, blood analysis, diagnosis, and neuroimaging data.
Dave Clarke, Chief Data Scientist, at Asystec said, “A big challenge for Alzheimer’s research is the integration and analysis of big heterogenous data to holistically understand the disease and the stratification of treatments. We’ve worked with Aridhia for over a year now and their focus on building a platform that supports collaborative clinical and healthcare research made AnalytiXagility an easy choice for us when selecting a partner to work with.”
The hope is that, by through linking among different biomarkers, the resulting predictive models might reveal new disease signatures, relationships and treatments, and encourage a move towards early identification of risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
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