UMB startup company’s exclusive licensed tool supports health care professionals
Published by UMB, 7/15/20
A company spun out of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy aims to leverage its approach — combining modern artificial intelligence (AI) with traditional mechanistic models — to arm health care professionals with the best data to provide personalized treatment trajectories for patients.
Pumas-Al, a University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) startup company, has been granted worldwide, exclusive rights to Lyv, a clinical decision support system designed to help health care professionals personalize treatment options for patients in real-time.
“This could be a revolutionary new tool for health care providers, potentially informing real-time decisions about patient treatments,” said Phil Robilotto, DO, MBA, associate vice president of UMB’s Office of Technology Transfer and director of UM Ventures.
Products such as Lyv could help health care providers make faster and more informed decisions about patient care.
The Lyv platform leverages clinical research and electronic health record (EHR) data from millions of patients to derive algorithms that can personalize health care delivery. Lyv will have modules for anti-infectives, anti-epileptics, anti-coagulants, and anti-cancer that can be used in a hospital setting, and can also incorporate algorithms during new drug development. Such personalized treatment can help improve therapeutic success rates and minimize dosing errors.
The therapeutic success rate of approved medicines is alarmingly low. Research performed at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy’s Center for Translational Medicine (CTM) led to the formation of Pumas AI and a novel Bayesian-based approach for deriving treatment algorithms that will be embedded into Lyv to personalize and improve health care delivery across a wide range of disease areas.
“This licensed technology from UMB will help personalize health care delivery,” said Joga Gobburu, Ph.D., MBA, professor of pharmacy practice and science at the School of Pharmacy, director of CTM, and chief executive officer of Pumas-AI. “Our vision is to greatly improve pharmaceutical and patient care success and reduce dosing errors. This licensing agreement brings us one step closer to achieving that goal.”
“As a pediatric intensivist, it is critically important that we do everything we can to maximize the safety of our patients,” said Adnan Bhutta, MBBS, FAAP, FCCM, professor of pediatrics and division head, pediatric critical care medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Automation technology and the use of decision support tools can be valuable in this process – especially by taking into account important physiologic parameters that need to be considered when making clinical decisions. This is particularly true in a high stress environment like an intensive care unit, where health care providers are asked to make hundreds of decisions around patient care on a daily basis.”
For more information, visit the Pumas-Al company website.
Founded in 1807, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) is Maryland’s public health, law, and human services university. Occupying 71 acres in downtown Baltimore, we are a pre-eminent institution for graduate and professional education and a prominent academic health center combining cutting-edge biomedical research and exceptional clinical care.
