The study predicted the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, working with commercial collaborators Optima Partners and Biogen, have found that artificial intelligence (AI) insights can predict the progression of human disease up to 10 years in advance.
Using AI and machine learning tools to identify protein patterns in blood, researchers are now able to predict the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), heart disease and type 2 diabetes (T2D) before they are diagnosed.
Combined, conditions such as dementia, heart and circulatory disease and diabetes are estimated to affect around 13 million people in the UK.
This study Natural aging The Wellcome-funded study analysed blood samples from UK Biobank up to 10 years after they were drawn to identify protein patterns in the blood that could indicate the development of Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
The team then tested whether the patterns could be used to diagnose medical conditions in blood samples from another group of people whose data had not been used to create the protein patterns.
They found that protein patterns improved predictive accuracy beyond traditional risk factors such as age, sex, lifestyle, cholesterol and other commonly measured clinical variables.
Researchers believe that being able to detect early warning signs of a wide range of diseases could lead to opportunities for early intervention and prevention.
“Further work is still required to translate these findings into practical applications in clinical practice, but our findings lay a strong foundation for incorporating novel risk prediction signatures to uncover potential pathways and mechanisms underlying disease,” said Chris Foley, PhD, managing director and chief scientist at Optima Partners.
In July, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) Announced The launch of two new hubs, run by Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge and the University of Birmingham, supported as part of a £106 million investment from ESPRC, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, to transform early disease diagnosis in the UK.
