Collaboration established to deliver federated learning in life sciences

Owkin, which is developing federated learning and AI technologies to advance medical research, has announced a collaboration with technology company NVIDIA and King's College London (KCL) to deliver federated learning in the healthcare and life sciences sector. It will initially connect four of London's teaching hospitals before expanding throughout the UK, and will offer AI services with the aim of accelerating research and improving clinical practice in a wide range of therapeutic areas, including cancer, heart failure and neurodegenerative disease. Owkin's co-founder and chief scientific officer, Gilles Wainrib, said: "This partnership brings together the best players in life science & healthcare, machine learning and data centre infrastructure. NVIDIA's platforms create the ideal and flexible footprint for hospitals to invest in machine learning. King's College London has assembled the engineering, medical and data science talent, the high-quality patient data, and the governance framework in the AI4VBH Centre, that will show the world the future of healthcare analytics and the power of machine learning. Together we will be enabling the formation of a decentralised dataset that will generate enormous value for research and clinical practice. "Owkin hopes to demonstrate that a Federating Learning architecture is safer for patients, and statistically equivalent to the traditional pooled model for analysis.