Collaboration to move us closer to personalised healthcare for children

Our patients have rare and complex conditions and developing new diagnoses and treatments for them can take a long time and is expensive.

GOSH has a long history of working in collaboration with industry partners to help develop better treatments and therapies, faster. We also have a track record of innovating with data to improve healthcare through our Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments Unit (GOSH DRIVE). We are closely connected with other UK and international children’s hospitals, so the work we do not only benefits children at GOSH but across the world.

We now have the opportunity to combine our experience as a leader in digital innovation in the NHS with the expertise of Roche, to identify better ways to care for children and young people with rare and complex diseases.

We will use cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable a wide variety of anonymised data to be examined on a large scale to improve patient outcomes.

While working with anonymised patient data is a part of this collaboration, no patient data will leave the GOSH DRIVE infrastructure. The main focus is to develop a better understanding of how the NHS and pharmaceutical companies can work together to improve expertise and enhance the lives and outcomes of patients.

Children are at the heart of everything we do at GOSH and funding received from Roche will be reinvested to support data research that will ultimately improve patient care. For example, this collaboration could help us to develop new ways of working to help recognise side effects or identify early signs of disease progression. This information could help highlight children who would benefit from targeted therapies through recruitment to, and improved, clinical trials.

All intellectual property will be owned by GOSH and shared openly with the other NHS organisations to accelerate learnings through access to prototypes. In addition, there will be sharing of findings and expertise through open publications and discussions with NHS partners. We believe this approach will help to break down existing barriers to the rapid uptake of new technology across the NHS.

During the five-year partnership, Roche will provide funding and second staff to work closely with GOSH DRIVE on projects, led by a steering group of leaders from both organisations. The team will work with other partners such as the public, patients, UK Government bodies and healthcare partners.

Research will be undertaken to the highest standards of information governance and data security in accordance with NHS principles, the UK Government Code of Practice and data protection legislation. GOSH patient data is stored securely within the Trust’s Digital Research Environment, a research platform hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud, which will facilitate safe, efficient data processing and enable immediate commencement of research.

Learn more about this collaboration with Roche.