Neuroimaging trailblazer awarded greatest innovator

Although the D&B Accelerate50 ranks com­pa­nies accord­ing to their com­pound annu­al growth rate, dri­ving all recip­i­ents is out­stand­ing inno­va­tion, which has fuelled their busi­ness suc­cess. Tech­nol­o­gy is a tremen­dous­ly pow­er­ful force that can sim­pli­fy and enhance all man­ner of process­es, tasks and activ­i­ties. And it is con­stant­ly evolv­ing, which is why inno­va­tion is a major con­sid­er­a­tion for most organ­i­sa­tions.

Put sim­ply, inno­va­tion is the beat­ing heart of both a pros­per­ous econ­o­my and a healthy, thriv­ing soci­ety. It is right, there­fore, that Dun & Brad­street doesn’t only recog­nise the finan­cial results of high-growth tech firms, but the inno­va­tion they have brought to mar­ket too. This inspires the Great­est Inno­va­tion Award in the Accelerate50.

Dur­ing a year of glob­al pan­dem­ic, it is per­haps apt that the Great­est Inno­va­tion would fall with­in the health­care sci­ence indus­try, with the award going to IXICO, a neu­roimag­ing provider that helps bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies opti­mise their drug devel­op­ment pipelines for patients suf­fer­ing from dis­or­ders such as Alzheimer’s dis­ease, Parkinson’s dis­ease and Huntington’s dis­ease, by trans­form­ing data into clin­i­cal­ly mean­ing­ful insights.

The impor­tance of clin­i­cal tri­als has been brought to the atten­tion of every­one in the last 12 months. When it comes to cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem (CNS) clin­i­cal tri­als, neu­roimag­ing is a pow­er­ful tool due to its unique abil­i­ty to visu­alise extra­or­di­nary infor­ma­tion about the struc­tur­al, func­tion­al and bio­chem­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the human brain. 

IXICO pro­vides analy­sis of med­ical image data gen­er­at­ed from the MRI and PET/SPECT brain scans required in tri­al study pro­to­cols. The out­put of the image analy­ses is used to sup­port clin­i­cal tri­al inclu­sion cri­te­ria, mon­i­tor patient safe­ty and assess the clin­i­cal effi­ca­cy of the drug.

The com­pa­ny was found­ed in 2004 by pro­fes­sors in imag­ing sci­ence from a trio of lead­ing Lon­don uni­ver­si­ties: Impe­r­i­al Col­lege, King’s Col­lege and Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege. Their mis­sion was to trans­late advances in imag­ing ana­lyt­ics from an aca­d­e­m­ic envi­ron­ment into health­care set­tings and tran­si­tion to a cen­tral point of analy­sis in CNS clin­i­cal tri­als.

At that time, com­pute pow­er was increas­ing, the inter­net was becom­ing avail­able at scale and there were new devel­op­ments in both MRI method­olo­gies and machine learn­ing to analyse the data. Clin­i­cal devel­op­ment was already begin­ning to move into neu­rol­o­gy and IXICO’s founders were keen to bring all these advance­ments togeth­er.

“If you think back 15 years, all of these things were done com­plete­ly man­u­al­ly. Some still are, but we’ve seen more and more automa­tion,” says Robin Wolz, chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer at IXICO. 

“We pio­neered seg­men­ta­tion tech­nolo­gies, which enable vol­umes in the brain to be auto­mat­i­cal­ly mea­sured and quan­ti­fied, elim­i­nat­ing the inten­sive time tra­di­tion­al­ly required of an expert radi­ol­o­gist. We’ve con­tin­ued to do that over the years when new tech­nol­o­gy has allowed MRIs to mea­sure new things, as well as from a machine-learn­ing stand­point, to inter­pret the images in a bet­ter, more auto­mat­ed way.”

Breakthrough AI

Around five years ago, IXICO became one of the first com­pa­nies work­ing with deep-learn­ing inno­va­tion to train neur­al net­works and auto­mate neu­roim­age analy­sis. At the heart of its inno­va­tion is its use of break­through and nov­el arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) tools to auto­mate and enhance analy­sis of brain imag­ing end­points and bio­mark­ers. Its ear­ly work in deep learn­ing paid off, with IXICO now at the fore­front of a tech­nol­o­gy which, fuelled by increas­ing com­put­er pow­er and datasets, is rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing every part of neu­roimag­ing data ana­lyt­ics.

Build­ing on its record of trans­lat­ing cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies into CNS clin­i­cal tri­al appli­ca­tions, last year IXICO devel­oped a new brain seg­men­ta­tion engine pow­ered by deep learn­ing. Using the adap­tive seg­men­ta­tion plat­form, tri­al spon­sors can mea­sure the vol­ume of even the most com­plex brain struc­tures with unpar­al­leled accu­ra­cy.

The plat­form enables train­ing of a brain seg­men­ta­tion algo­rithm for a spe­cif­ic clin­i­cal ques­tion with high­ly curat­ed datasets. Togeth­er with an increas­ing vol­ume of study datasets and IXICO’s spe­cial­ist neu­ro­science domain knowl­edge, it enables devel­op­ment of more accu­rate imag­ing bio­mark­ers and mea­sure­ments in CNS drug devel­op­ment.

In a recent project col­lab­o­ra­tion between IXICO and Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, which seg­ment­ed brain struc­tures known to be affect­ed by Huntington’s dis­ease, the AI plat­form dis­played seg­men­ta­tion accu­ra­cy pre­vi­ous­ly unseen in auto­mat­ed approach­es.

“We can now quan­ti­fy and mea­sure things at a speed that was unthink­able,” says Wolz. “Some of these things took hours, if not days, in the past and now we’re talk­ing about sec­onds. The way we have worked from day one is to always be close­ly engaged with sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ments, aca­d­e­m­ic research and tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ments, and then try to trans­late those tech­ni­cal abil­i­ties into our appli­ca­tions as they emerge.”

Despite the chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances of 2020, IXICO con­tin­ued to climb at a sim­i­lar rate to pre­ced­ing years, report­ing 26 per cent growth as well as dou­bling its prof­its, invest­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly in new areas and increas­ing its work­force by 25 per cent. This suc­cess was part­ly facil­i­tat­ed by a remote mod­el it has cham­pi­oned for years, based on cen­tralised analy­sis and vir­tu­al engage­ment with the var­i­ous clin­i­cal sites it works with.

The inno­va­tion nev­er slows down and while IXICO’s five-year strat­e­gy involves fur­ther pen­e­tra­tion of its core neu­roimag­ing mar­ket, it is also eye­ing growth oppor­tu­ni­ties in oth­er areas, includ­ing post-mar­ket­ing appli­ca­tions. For exam­ple, a cou­ple of years ago the com­pa­ny launched Asses­sa, a clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port tool for patient selec­tion and post-mar­ket­ing sur­veil­lance. The secure dig­i­tal plat­form enables the remote trans­fer of clin­i­cal and imag­ing data to pro­vide cen­tral expert and auto­mat­ed review and analy­sis.

“That’s a high­ly impor­tant aspect of drugs like the mon­o­clon­al anti­bod­ies we now see val­i­dat­ed in Alzheimer’s,” says Wolz. “We’re all excit­ed about the poten­tial with Adu­canum­ab, Bio­gen’s Alzheimer’s drug cur­rent­ly under review in Amer­i­ca by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. If the drug is approved for clin­i­cal use, safe­ty mon­i­tor­ing is very impor­tant and some of those safe­ty events are linked to brain imag­ing. We see that plat­form extend­ing into oth­er ther­a­peu­tic areas, while we also fur­ther explore the poten­tial new mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties in the dig­i­tal bio­mark­ers space.

“We start­ed to work in mea­sure­ments from wear­ables around five years ago. We run a cou­ple of com­mer­cial tri­als in dif­fer­ent indi­ca­tions, col­lect­ing data from wrist-worn devices in areas like sleep and activ­i­ty. That’s a big top­ic with huge expec­ta­tion in the indus­try. It’s not an easy space because of a lot of reg­u­la­to­ry lim­i­ta­tions, but we see huge poten­tial and it’s an area we are very famil­iar with because it’s fac­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions the imag­ing mar­ket went through 15 to 20 years ago. We’re well placed to move fur­ther into these areas due to the strong sim­i­lar­i­ties with the mar­ket we cur­rent­ly oper­ate in.”

For more infor­ma­tion and to see the full list of win­ners of Dun & Brad­street’s inau­gur­al Accelerate50, please vis­it the awards hub