insitro collaboration
A partnership to advance drug discovery
By bringing together INSIGHT’s capabilities in ophthalmic imaging data curation and insitro’s expertise in machine-learning-driven drug discovery, the collaboration aims to unlock new treatment possibilities for dementia and related conditions.
About the collaboration
INSIGHT and insitro, a US biotech company, are collaborating to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model trained on INSIGHT’s vast repository of anonymised retinal imaging data at Moorfields Eye Hospital.
The scale of imaging data curated by INSIGHT, linked to dementia diagnosis information, is globally unique and will enable the generation of a high-quality model for insitro to use for drug discovery.
The model will provide a new tool for insitro to help uncover novel therapeutic approaches and bring new medicines to patients that currently have no other option, with a particular focus on neurodegenerative conditions.
Underpinning the collaboration is the science of Oculomics - using biological markers in the eye to detect systemic disease. (You can read more about Oculomics here).
How will the collaboration work?
Joint development of the foundation model will utilize INSIGHT’s eye research data infrastructure, which has enabled previous pioneering work in Oculomics at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.
The foundation model will be trained by the INSIGHT team on a curated dataset of millions of routinely collected Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images linked to clinical records. As a result of this linkage, the model will be capable of identifying patterns linked to disease risk and progression.
To reaffirm the safety and privacy of patient data, only INSIGHT researchers at Moorfields will access the data while building the foundation model in a secure research environment.
What is the expected impact?
Using the co-developed foundation model, and fine-tuning it on disease-specific genetic data, insitro can accelerate the discovery of biological targets for development of novel treatments for neurodegenerative and related conditions.
We have worked with insitro to produce a video that introduces the collaboration. This short film explains how the joint work aims to advance discovery of new treatments, and its potential to improve patient care.