The UK has established itself as a hub for biotech and life sciences expertise. The ‘Golden Triangle’, an area covering London, Oxford, and Cambridge, has become a focal point for biotech, and includes AstraZeneca’s Centre for Genomics Research, where cutting-edge AI disease prediction technology has been developed.

The new AI technology, called MILTON, is a machine-learning research tool with the ability to predict more than 1,000 diseases long before there are any symptoms, drawing on comprehensive data from nearly 500,000 participants in UK Biobank.

MILTON - short for MachIne Learning with phenoType associatiONs - was able to detect subtle patterns in the data that would have been invisible to the human eye and link them to diseases the patients were diagnosed with up to a decade or more later. 

Slavé Petrovski, who led the research, said:

"For many of these diseases, by the time they manifest clinically, and the individual goes to the doctor because of an ailment or visible observation that is far down the line from when the disease process began.

"We can pick up signatures in an individual that are highly predictive of developing diseases like Alzheimer's, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), kidney disease and many others."

AstraZeneca used data from 500,000 people who are part of the UK Biobank - the world’s most comprehensive source of health data available for research, housing a vast and continuously growing dataset of biological, health and lifestyle information collected over 15 years from half a million UK volunteers.

Its predictive performance was rated as "exceptional" for 121 diseases, and "highly predictive" for another 1,091, according to the study published in the journal Nature Genetics.

The Biotech Sector

The intersection of AI and biotechnology is transforming the whole sector with substantial investments into established companies such as global pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca to a surge of start-ups focussing on specialised AI-driven drug discovery platforms. 

AI has the potential to create new products in drug discovery, personalised medicine, synthetic biology, and healthcare data. As a result, AI, machine learning and data engineering specialists will be key job openings in biotech as AI integrates into scientific research.

AI Jobs

Our AI and data engineering recruitment partners include spin-outs from the University of Oxford, University College London (UCL), Cambridge University, graduates of the Entrepreneur First programme and established scale-ups and SMEs.

Richard Wheeler Associates is also listed in the Entrepreneur Handbook as one of the 15 top recruitment agencies in the UK & London. 

We’re proud of our track record of successfully representing exceptional people - people with vision, experts in their field, many with PhD’s - who are looking to work on exciting new AI/Data Engineering projects.

We partner with award winning AI-driven companies to recruit for jobs based in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, the high-tech M3, M4 corridor, as well as part and fully remote across different countries and time zones.

Find out more about our AI recruitment service or contact us if you are looking to hire and would like to find out more.