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Agora Labs, a startup founded two years ago by two Greeks and an Italian, is developing a platform that will allow pharmaceutical companies, artificial intelligence firms and researchers to access extensive real-time data from public hospitals, patient medical histories and a range of medical devices.
George Pikramenos, one of the three co-founders of the startup, which itself was spun out of a research center, acknowledges that there are privacy issues, but adds that there is a huge amount of data out there that needs to be processed.
Such processing could provide answers to crucial questions such as the side effects of a drug, its interactions with other drugs and its costs to national health systems. It could also enable the monitoring of rare diseases for which randomised clinical trials cannot be conducted.
“New technologies based on artificial intelligence are constantly being developed. There are companies that develop diagnostic models and have to process large amounts of data,” says Pikramenos.
An estimated 30% of all data worldwide is generated by healthcare services. Accessing this data is difficult and processing can be hampered by quality issues.
