Conference within the framework of the BHH Summit 2021
Paper published in IM Médico Hospitalario.
In this session, various experts have explored how these developments can affect “the patient’s journey to the future”, which is the key theme of the Barcelona Health Hub Summit.
It is obvious that the current digital super-trends have a great effect on the field of life sciences, and new tools based on AI are beneficial to patients, doctors and other parties involved.
According to Francesc Cayuela, founder and CEO of BD Care, AI skyrockets the ability to calculate data to process and give more information about rare diseases. “To me, AI is part of computer science that consists of the computing of human intelligence”. He highlighted that there are different methods: supervised, unsupervised and mixed.
His company works hard and strives to give all the contribution to the health care system “because what we are looking for is to generate valid knowledge so that it can solve current healthcare problems. We are facing various problems: diagnosis, emergencies, monitoring of patients, prediction and compilation of knowledge generated in the training”.
Moreover, María Luisa Martínez Triguero, Clinical Chief, Clinical Analysis Service, Hospital Universitario y Politécnico La Fe, València, focused on explaining what Lysosomal Acid Lipase Deficiency disease (LAL-D) is, an ultrarare disease caused by a congenital error of the lipid metabolism, characterised by the deposition of cholesterol and triglyceride esters in the body.
“It produces a wide range of symptoms, being easier to diagnose in newborns, but it can also manifest during adolescence. It can also cause liver problems and can be confused with other diseases”. The doctor urges for early diagnosis before organs become altered. “We need to provide help, both from a health and social point of view, provide quick access to treatment and raise awareness of the disease so that it becomes more known”.
Francesc Cayuela said that the journey that this type of patient goes through is really complicated and getting a diagnosis can take a long time. Because of this, he chooses AI tools, “such as the Doctor 2 Doctor structure, an online tool where doctors who know about this disease can share their knowledge with others to guide them towards the most accurate diagnosis”. He also talked about the Doctor 2 Patient tool, which is designed to gather information from patients, such as symptoms or their concerns, ”so that it can be passed on to D2D”.
Leticia Beleta, General Manager Iberia at Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease, explained that their role as a company is to research and innovate drugs, and they are specialists in rare diseases, which is why they endorse the collaboration they have with BD Care, “we need and support people with passion and ideas so that we can unite both specialities”.
María Luisa Martínez has contributed to this collaboration as a doctor, “AI helps on a large scale to facilitate the diagnosis of [LAL-D] and many rare diseases; the amount of data is important and can only be used and organised this way so that early treatment can also be found”.
Francesc Cayuela made it clear that the main participant is the patients, but also the hospitals, “treatments for rare diseases are more complicated in terms of costs and time because they do not have enough tools to deal with them and be able to reduce the costs”.
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