John Snow Labs Awarded Phase I SBIR Contract for the Development of Medical Large Language Models for Infectious and Immune-Mediated Diseases

Grant will fund R&D of LLMs for automated entity recognition, relation extraction, and ontology metadata enrichment from free-text clinical notes

LEWES, Del., Sept. 17, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for the development of medical Large Language Models (LLMs) for infectious and immune-mediated diseases. The award, totaling $299,208 for one year, will be used for research and development of LLMs for automated named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction, and ontology metadata enrichment from free-text clinical notes.

A prevailing challenge in this field involves accurately linking identified entities from tables, columns, or individual data values and their relationships. With a lack of semantic data standards for tracking infectious diseases like tuberculosis, measles, influenza, COVID-19, and others, it’s difficult to accurately measure and study them. The ability to make sense of relevant information from different healthcare organizations, coding systems, and modalities of data is critical to better understand the spread of disease.

Another important component to advancement in the field is ensuring findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) of information among the scientific community. This enables researchers to easily discover pertinent information and use it to further improve the understanding and outcomes around infectious disease. As such, this project goes beyond creating new tools, with a focus on promoting the sharing of data across the medical community.

The John Snow Labs team will collaborate on this project with Nasia Safdar, MD, infectious disease physician at The University of Wisconsin Health and Christina Cuomo, PhD, Viatris Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University.

“This SBIR Phase I award from NIAID represents a significant milestone for John Snow Labs and our commitment to using AI to accelerate modern medicine,” said David Talby, CTO, John Snow Labs. “The development of Medical LLMs that researchers can use to address complex challenges in the measurement and tracking of infectious disease has the potential to mitigate the spread of disease and save lives.”

About John Snow Labs
John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, provides state-of-the-art software, models, and data to help healthcare and life science organizations put AI to good use. Developer of Spark NLP, Healthcare NLP, the Healthcare GPT LLM, the Generative AI Lab No-Code Platform, and the Medical Chatbot, John Snow Labs’ award-winning medical AI software powers the world’s leading pharmaceuticals, academic medical centers, and health technology companies. Creator and host of The NLP Summit, the company is committed to further educating and advancing the global AI community.

About the Funding
This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 75N93024C00010.

Contact
Gina Devine
John Snow Labs
gina@johnsnowlabs.com