The PharosAI project, led by King’s College and partners, has been awarded £100,000 in seed funding by the DSIT’s Research Venture Catalyst Programme. This funding is to develop a platform allowing AI researchers and companies access to cancer-related data from over 50,000 patient samples.

Aimed at enhancing AI in cancer diagnostics within the NHS, PharosAI plans to create a ‘data refinery’ for developing AI applications. Additionally, the venture is set to offer AI evaluation, deployment services, and educational programs through the King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub and other partners. PharosAI is collaborating with NHS England, UK Biobank, and tech giants like Google to further its goals.

“The PharosAI initiative, led by King’s College London, will be a game-changer in terms of how we will be able to access complex clinical-valuable data, how we will swiftly evaluate and enable testing the deployment for AI-assisted healthcare. Being part of this new DSIT initiative, we are excited to bring together an excellent Consortium ranging from academia, public sector and industry.”

 — Professor Anita Grigoriadis, leader of the project and Head of the Comprehensive Cancer Centre

“PharosAI will benefit the UK PLC by positioning the UK as a leader in multimodal precision medicine, by helping to address health inequality across the country, by improving workflow efficiency in the NHS through the implementation of faster and cost-effective personalised medicine and by attracting international life investment in our life sciences industry.”

 — Professor Anita Grigoriadis

“We are facing a UK and global challenge in healthcare. The increase of complexity in tests and treatments and the decline in the health workforce worldwide is creating an unprecedented burden on healthcare systems.

The AI revolution presents an opportunity to tackle these challenges but currently the journey to develop and deploy AI applications into the NHS is too complex. Our goal is to simplify that journey with PharosAI, by providing the necessary data, tools, education and services to build high quality, safe and patient centric AI that will benefit the NHS, clinicians and ultimately revolutionise patient care.”

 — Dr Gregory Verghese, Research Associate, Cancer Bioinformatics, King’s and Breast Cancer Now, Guy’s Hospital