Novartis signs AI ophthalmology pact with RetinAI

Novartis has signed a multi-year collaboration agreement with RetinAI to utilise the latter’s IT solutions and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support multiple projects in ophthalmology and digital health.

RentinAI is a Swiss biotech company focused on developing software solutions to accelerate clinics, research and pharmaceutical workflows using advanced machine learning and computer vision.

The first project to be carried out under the new Novartis agreement will support an international clinical study involving patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD).

The study will investigate the influence of optical coherence tomography (OCT) image solutions using AI on the assessment of disease activity.

This study is set to be conducted in several clinical centres across a number of European countries and candidate and will involve over 500 patients.

It will use RetinAI’s web-based software platform, dubbed RetinAI Discovery, to process data at scale across imaging platforms and devices.

The Discovery platform is already used by healthcare professionals to process imaging data, compute imaging biomarkers and track changes over time for some of the most common types of eye disease.

“With previous projects, RetinAI’s services have enabled us to enhance and more efficiently structure retina scans and data collected from our clinical studies,” said Dirk Sauer, global development head of the ophthalmology franchise at Novartis.

“Together with RetinAI, we are working on end-to-end solutions to generate swift and comprehensive disease insights to better treat patients and improve patient outcomes,” he added.