Berg Health's team used a specialised form of artificial intelligence to compare samples taken from patients with the most aggressive strains of cancer, including pancreatic, bladder and brain, with those from non-cancerous individuals. The technology highlighted disparities between the corresponding biological profiles, selecting those it predicted would respond best to the drug. "We’re looking at 14 trillion data points in a single tissue sample. We can’t humanly process that," said Niven Narain, a clinical oncologist and Berg co-founder. "Because we’re taking this data-driven approach we need a supercomputer capability. "We use them for mathematics in a big data analytic platform, so it can collate that data into various categories: healthy population for women, for men, disease candidates etc, and it’s able to take these slices in time and integrate them so that we’re able to see where it’s gone wrong and develop drugs based on that information," Mr Narain said. Berg expects to begin phase two trials of the drug next January, meaning it has already been proven to be effective on animal or cell culture tests and is safe to continue investigating in humans. Mr Narain said it usually takes $2.6bn (£1.7bn) and 12 to 14 years to get a drug to market, and that the trial metrics within four and a half years worth of development indicated the time it takes to create a drug can be cut by at least 50 per cent. This will also translate into less expenditure, he claimed. "I don’t think we’re going to spend $1.3bn to produce our first drug, so the cost is cut by at least 50 per cent too," he added. "‘There’s a lot of trial and error in the old model so a lot of those costs are due to the failure of really expensive clinical trials. We’re able to be more predictive and effective... and that’s going to cut hundreds of millions of dollars off the cost.’
cancer Health , a pharmaceutical startup , has developed a cancer drug in half the time expected by using a specialised form of artificial intelligence which takes samples from patients with the most aggressive strains of cancer and compares﻿ them to non - cancerous patients . The AI system looks at 14 trillion data ##sets from a single patient tissue sample , and can highlight the differences between the corresponding biological profiles . Niven Narain , the Co - founder of Berg , said that it usually takes £ 1.7bn and 12 to 14 years to get a drug to market , however Berg says this will be cut in half with the new AI technology . it is to begin phase two trials of the cancer drug in January 2016 .