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Kakao Healthcare, the digital health arm of Korean conglomerate Kakao, is helping small pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses gain access to AI models through its latest partnership.
It entered into a strategic collaboration with Providence Health Care Ventures, a subsidiary of Catholic non-profit health care provider Providence Health Care in Canada.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT
Based on a media release, the collaboration aims to "co-develop solutions that enable secure, scalable, and globally relevant applications of health data and AI."
The partnership will focus on AI model development using Kakao Healthcare's federated learning framework. These models will be later tested on PHCV's AI platform for validation at the point of care.
They will also focus on developing a common data model "to support global standardisation and ease of interoperability for trusted health data flow."
The companies emphasised that they will use "privacy-enhancing technologies to facilitate distributed model training without sharing sensitive information for sovereign AI development."
Small and medium enterprises in life sciences, particularly in biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, will be onboarded to participate in their project.
WHY IT MATTERS
In a press statement, Kakao Healthcare and PHCV said they want to make "health care AI development more accessible to SMEs while maintaining the highest data security standards."
For Kakao Healthcare, the partnership will allow it to leverage AI technologies for advanced data analysis, serve as a stepping stone into the global market beginning with Canada, and open opportunities for further research collaborations worldwide.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
Earlier this month, PHCV launched an accelerator programme to support Canadian SMEs in testing their health technologies in real-world settings. The programme provides access to PHCV's extensive clinical datasets, including the Integrated Health Informatics Datalab that holds clinical, imaging, and genomic data from over 1.5 million patients.
Meanwhile, Kakao Healthcare, which offers an AI-powered digital diabetes management service, has been expanding globally. In the past 12 months, it partnered with Bayada, an international home health care provider, and Rumah Sakit Universitas Indonesia to introduce PASTA.
