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Washington University Partners with Health Innovation Startup to Identify COVID-19 Drugs

  • November 10, 2020

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has partnered with PercayAI, a St. Louis-based health innovation startup, as part of a pilot project aimed at scouting potential drug treatments for COVID-19.

The research collaboration involves using PercayAI’s augmented intelligence software to analyze data from Washington University’s Institute for Informatics and McDonnell Genome Institute in the hopes of determining drug combinations that could be used in treating patients that have been diagnosed with COVID-19.

“This is part of a long-term strategy for PercayAI to aggregate additional information across the health care spectrum for the treatment of various diseases, focusing in neuro and other areas — and like everybody else now — COVID since there is such a critical need in the short-term for that research,” said Preston Keller, PercayAI’s Chief Commercial Officer.

The partnership between PercayAI and Washington University in Missouri could result in findings that lead to additional research studies to identify and advance drug treatments for COVID-19, officials said.

“As COVID-19 continues to spread globally, augmented intelligence and machine learning can play a key role in helping us address this crisis,” said Phillip Payne, Chief Data Scientist at Washington University School of Medicine and Director of the university’s Institute for Informatics. “Machine learning technology enables computers to simulate human intelligence and analyze massive amounts of data quickly to identify patterns that could steer us toward promising drug combinations against COVID-19.”

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