Bayer has continued its policy of setting up R&D hubs to get closer to innovative companies with a UK site that will focus on applying artificial intelligence to drug discovery and disease diagnosis. The cluster – based at Reading's Green Park – is the seventh in the German company's LifeHub network, located at R&D hot spots around the globe, and is further evidence of the UK's leading position in AI technology. According to the Tech Nation 2019 report, the UK is today the world's third biggest market for AI investment after the US and China with funding rising six-fold since 2014. Bayer already has one company getting ready to set up a unit at LifeHub UK. Sensyne Health, which started working with the German group earlier this year, will base a project focusing on applying AI to automate image evaluation in radiology at the site.

DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company owned by Google, has attempted to justify why it needs access to millions of NHS patient records for a kidney monitoring app, after a new investigation from New Scientist questioned whether an ethical approval process should have been obtained first. The AI research lab, acquired by Google in 2014 for around 400 million, signed a data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust on 29 September 2015. The agreement gives Google DeepMind access to the names, addresses, and medical conditions of the 1.6 million patients that are treated at Barnet, Chase Farm, and the Royal Free hospitals each year, as well as data on all patients treated by the Trust in the past five years. This week, New Scientist questioned why Google DeepMind needs access to so much data on so many people, including those who have never experienced kidney problems, for the app, which is called Streams. Streams -- used by Royal Free clinicians in three separate trials since December 2015 -- is designed to detect acute kidney injury (AKI), a condition that kills more than 1,000 people a month.