AstraZeneca has entered into strategic partnerships with three leading healthcare innovators and organisations in Singapore, using artificial intelligence (AI), big data and genomics to step up the development of life-changing biomedical science.
These partners include AI start-up eko.ai, the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Building on government initiatives such as the National AI Strategy, a key step in Singapore’s Smart Nation journey, and the Healthcare Industry Transformation Map, AstraZeneca and its partners aim to speed up the deployment of digital healthcare technology, accelerate scientific talent and skills development, and advance Singapore’s position as a global hub for cutting-edge health science innovation.
“We are excited to partner with Singapore’s best healthcare innovators and contribute our scientific and bioinformatics capabilities to the Singaporean biomedical ecosystem, which we now consider an important player in our growing global network of health innovation hubs,” said Jo Feng, SVP for Asia at AstraZeneca.
The key objective of these collaborations is to help Singaporeans enjoy good health and quality healthcare, by using technology to identify risk factors for disease prevention, enable earlier diagnosis, and to improve the treatment and management of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
With eko.ai, AstraZeneca will work to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-technology that speeds up the diagnosis of heart disease.
This can help the 600,000 Singaporeans living with diabetes, for whom heart disease is the most frequent and fatal complication. Heart failure is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation.
With A*STAR, AstraZeneca will work to advance Singapore’s research capabilities in genomics and precision medicine. This will help develop a better understanding of Asian genomics to inform potential new disease prevention strategies and drug targets to treat ailments of particular burden to the Asian population.
With the SingHealth Duke-NUS AMC, AstraZeneca will be exploring collaboration on the acceleration of open innovation, real-world evidence generation, and development of new health technologies to enhance patient-centric care and improve care outcomes.
