Liverpool-US alliance to accelerate AI-driven drug discovery

Following Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram’s trade mission, the University of Liverpool will work with Boston-based BPGbio, Inc. to harness large-scale healthcare data to accelerate the development of new treatments.

The collaboration, conducted through the University’s Civic HealthTech Innovation Zone (CHI-Zone), will use advanced computer techniques to analyse a wide range of health information – such as medical scans, lab results, and detailed biological data about genes and proteins – alongside patient outcomes.

Scientists hope to uncover cause-and-effect links in disease processes that could point to new drugs.

Professor Iain Buchan, Professor Claire Eyres and Dr Peter Green from the University of Liverpool joined Mayor Rotheram in a high-level meeting with BPGbio President and CEO Dr Niven Narain and colleagues during a Liverpool City Region trade mission to Boston in October 2024.

The success of the trip has led to the latest investment, which will create jobs in the region and further strengthen the University of Liverpool and the city region’s place in the global health-tech sector.

BPGbio, Inc. is a US company that uses AI to develop new medicines. The collaboration will significantly expand and enhance its NAi ‘Bayesian AI’ platform – an advanced AI system designed to identify what drives diseases.

Led by an interdisciplinary team at the University of Liverpool, the collaboration will advance the platform’s speed, scalability, and utility across drug discovery and precision healthcare.

Professor Iain Buchan, W.H. Duncan Chair in Public Health Systems and Principal Investigator of the program, added: “The CHI-Zone is bringing together industry and civic partners to create and evaluate data-intensive solutions to some of society’s most challenging health problems. 

“Biology and healthcare urgently need AI systems that can generate [an] understanding [of] how diseases work, not just correlations.

“Our collaboration with BPGbio, Inc. brings together cutting-edge Bayesian computation, multi-omics research, and secure data environments to deliver exactly that.

“This is the blueprint for the next generation of precision medicine.”

Niven R. Narain, PhD, President and CEO, BPGbio, said: “We are building the future of mechanism-based drug discovery and an informed data-driven healthcare ecosystem.

“Medicine and healthcare solutions fail not because of a lack of data, but instead because we don’t let human biology guide the path, since we are all very different and nothing should be a one-size-fits-all solution.”