Favourable Research Ethics Committee Opinion

RAIR Health Limited, a digital contract research organisation (“dCRO”) focused on the generation of proprietary insights from ophthalmic data and images, announces that it has, together with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (“UHCW”), received a favourable ethical opinion for their ophthalmology research database, from a Health Research Authority, Research Ethics Committee. The approval builds on the recent announcement of a non-exclusive data license agreement with UHCW, giving RAIR non-exclusive access to anonymised patient data derived from a population of c.1m people across the Trust’s region.

The approval will enable UHCW to start pre-processing data to make it accessible to artificial intelligence models and to curateanonymised datasets and images to support RAIR’s projects and dCRO solutions in the field of ophthalmology.

Steve Cox, CEO of RAIR Health, said: "This decision marks the first step in establishing a vibrant ecosystem focussed around using data-led research to raise the standard of care for patients.  We are extremely mindful of both the significant opportunities to improve patient outcomes, which may derive from this data, and also the trust which is placed in us by those who contributed to it. The committee’s favourable review of our scientific and governance framework reflects a commitment by UHCW and RAIR, to apply the highest standards of data governance to our future endeavours.”

Sergio Pagliarini, Macular Services and Chief Investigator for Artificial Intelligence at UHCW

said “We are delighted to have received Research Ethic Committee approval.  UHCW has already established a strong reputation in medical imaging and we have a vast retinal imaging library. We are pleased to be working with the RAIR team. Their vision has been fundamental in bringing this project together and we look forward to developing a long-term partnership. We are also looking forward to expanding the project to include other NHS Trusts, in order to investigate how artificial intelligence might be applied to improve healthcare delivery, to automate disease detection, to refine referrals, to develop new treatments and to identify those patients who can benefit from early treatment, before the onset of symptoms.”

Once the database is completed, RAIR and UHCW expect to derive proprietary insights from the application of artificial intelligence to these and other complementary datasets.  Such insights will support projects, both internally and on behalf of academic and commercial researchers. It is anticipated that these projects will result in novel products and services which facilitate precision medicine, improved patient pathways, early diagnosis and value-based medicine, for chronic diseases which manifest in the eye. 

For further information, please contact:

RAIR Health Limited

Steve Cox  Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7924 2345

Chief Executive Officer

About RAIR Health Limited: RAIR is a data-driven digital contract research organisation.  It is focused on the provision of solutions related to the application of artificial intelligence in the development of digital health products and the provision of data to meet the growing demand for digital information to support the development pathway. RAIR is focused on those chronic diseases which manifest in the eye which, aside from ophthalmology, include large therapeutic areas like cardiovascular, rheumatological and neurological disease.

Please visit www.rair.ai