SparkBeyond
Fueling Healthcare Innovations with AI Powered Research

In 2013, a group of tech enthusiasts and researchers performed a radical experiment where they crawled the web for algorithms, similar to what Google does for text. The experiment hit the bull’s eye, setting the ball in motion for a novel AI powered research engine, powered by the world’s largest algorithmic library, with the goal of industrializing meaningful discoveries. Thus began the journey of SparkBeyond—a stalwart of artificial intelligence (AI)—based in New York City, Tel Aviv, London and Singapore. The company has carved a niche for itself through a deep penchant for venturing into the “uncharted territories” in AI to come up with creative ideas to solve problems in a broad range of domains, with a strong focus on healthcare and life sciences.

At the core of SparkBeyond’s finesse is its AI-powered research engine, built using open source software and the company’s proprietary capabilities. When deployed in the production environment, the engine automatically takes in data from multiple sources, to discover solutions for health diagnosis, readmissions to hospitals and a myriad of other outcomes. To further augment solution discovery, the engine can also consider the knowledge input from humans. “Our platform is a machine for exploring a set of potential solutions to problems, using data, computational building blocks and a network of human intelligence,” mentions Sergey Davidovich, CEO, SparkBeyond. In a striking difference from the conventional analytical platforms, SparkBeyond’s research engine brings to the healthcare domain the ability to overlay the relevant semantic context, thus creating transparency to physicians and domain experts.

The adaptive nature of SparkBeyond’s research engine is designed to address a key challenge in the healthcare domain, where new discoveries, changes in drug resistance, trends in human behavior or new food ingredients lead to a constant need to revisit past assumptions.

SparkBeyond is a machine for discovering potential solutions to problems, using machine intelligence, a novel computational framework and wisdom of the crowds

The research should never stop. The platform automatically comes up with ideas for diagnosis through multiple combinations of data, which could take years to formulate using traditional research techniques. “Our value proposition is enabled by the combination of enabling technology with an entirely new way of thinking, leading to high throughput research,” mentions Dr. Ron Karidi, CTO, SparkBeyond. SparkBeyond works closely with its partners to help them master the new paradigm.

SparkBeyond’s state-of-the-art research engine has been instrumental in the materialization of several important innovations in the healthcare sector. Among them was early detection of colon-cancer, discovery of drivers for readmissions to hospitals or hip fracture risk drivers, based on data from a broad range of data sources.

The trail of innovations enabled by SparkBeyond extends far and wide. Further, projects implemented for one domain serves as an application for another, which Sergey describes as “an interesting cross-pollination happening between various domains to increase the serendipity—one of the values we strongly believe in.” In one case, the portal designed to help a pharma company served as an excellent automated pharma co-vigilance solution for processing the various cases, which immensely benefited SparkBeyond’s partners.

The proven value proposition enabled SparkBeyond to build strong partnerships with leading Pharma companies and healthcare providers, which fueled the rapid global expansion through a growing number of hubs across the globe. Simultaneously, SparkBeyond is committed to solving global challenges through its pro-bono activity.