MIT, Takeda Partner to Develop Healthcare Artificial Intelligence

January 07, 2020 - MIT School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited have partnered to use artificial intelligence tools to benefit health and drug development.

The new MIT-Takeda Program will be centered within the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic) and will leverage knowledge from both organizations. Takeda is supporting the program with a three-year investment, with the potential for a two-year extension.

Through this partnership, MIT will have access to pharmaceutical infrastructure and expertise, allowing researchers to focus on challenges with practical and lasting impact. A new educational program offered through J-Clinic will enable Takeda to learn from and engage with researchers from MIT and offer insights that will advance healthcare.

“We are thrilled to create this collaboration with Takeda,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. “The MIT-Takeda Program will build a community dedicated to the next generation of AI and system-level breakthroughs that aim to advance healthcare around the globe.”

The MIT-Takeda Program will support MIT students, staff, faculty, and researchers across the Institute who are working at the intersection of AI and human health. The program will merge different disciplines, theory and practical implementation, and algorithm and hardware innovations. Additionally, the new program will create new, multidimensional collaborations between academia and industry.

The MIT-Takeda Program will fund 6-10 flagship research projects per year in machine learning and healthcare, focusing on areas such as disease diagnosis, prediction of treatment response, development of novel biomarkers, process control and improvement, drug discovery, and clinical trial optimization.

The program will also provide eleven annual fellowships that will support graduate students working at the intersection of AI and health, creating significant programming for young students. Additionally, Takeda employees will be able to boost individual and organizational learning in integrating AI and machine learning technologies into practical solutions.

The partnership will build on MIT’s efforts to apply advanced technologies to issues in healthcare, including drug development. In December 2017, the organization announced a new project that aims to align innovative pharmaceutical development with real-world patient care. The initiative seeks to break down siloes between pharma and patient care by equipping clinical trials with a real-world evidence “learning engine.”

"While pharmaceutical R&D is a global enterprise, the value of new medicines is assessed and driven locally. This has always been true in other countries, but is increasingly the case in the US," Gigi Hirsch, MD, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation and the NEWDIGS Initiative, said at the time.

"Our goal is to integrate a number of emerging but fragmented policy, process, and technology innovations into a system that works better for everyone, and especially for patients."

Through this new partnership with Takeda, MIT will continue to advance the use of AI, machine learning, and other innovative tools in the healthcare space.

“We share with MIT a vision where next-generation intelligent technologies can be better developed and applied across the entire health care ecosystem,” says Anne Heatherington, senior vice president and head of Data Sciences Institute (DSI) at Takeda. “Together, we are creating an incredible opportunity to support research, enhance the drug development process, and build a better future for patients.”