Dr Michelle Perugini, Presagen CEO and co-founder addressed the AWS Online Summit today to explain how Presagen is using AWS’ global cloud infrastructure to improve women’s healthcare outcomes a global scale.
Presagen enrolled in the AWS Activate program which provided the startup AWS credits and technical expertise, allowing them to build a world-class, global scale product.
Presagen's core product is a social network connecting clinics and medical data to drive AI-based healthcare products that are both accessible and affordable. An early success is Life Whisperer, a product that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to improve embryo selection in IVF through assessment of implantation potential and genetic integrity.
Life Whisperer has reduced the time to pregnancy for patients by 15% on average and improved the accuracy in choosing an embryo by 25-30% over the current standard of care. It can also assess genetic abnormalities to a high degree of accuracy and in non-invasive means.
The first baby, Ebenezer Coriakula, was born in 2020 using this process. Previously, parents Lorraine and James had undergone IVF for two years before the clinic introduced Life Whisperer at the beginning of the year. “I can’t even explain holding him in my arms,” Lorraine Coriakula said.
Toni Knowlson, Head of Strategic Initiatives, ANZ for AWS said, "Adelaide-based startup, Presagen is an incredible example of how innovative technology can make a positive impact on people’s lives by helping people around the world achieve their goal of having a family sooner. The scalability of AWS’s global infrastructure, and support through the AWS Activate program has enabled Presagen to expand quickly around the world, while remaining in South Australia."
Dr Michelle Perugini said “The work that we do in women's health is incredibly inspiring, it's about improving women's healthcare outcomes at a global scale using technology. Women's health has been somewhat forgotten. Having them benefit from the technology that we've developed and changing what is quite a stressful and traumatic process for them and making that easier is just such an amazing opportunity.”
Perugini explains, "We launched our Life Whisperer product in early 2020, and in October we had the news of the first baby being born by virtue of having used our technology. At that point, it really becomes real, because you can see the real-world benefit that the technology has had for those patients through that process of IVF.”
“Because we built this platform now, we can apply it to a whole range of different use cases and we are interested, initially, in women's health, and we have a whole range of products that we are looking at in the women's health space. But this platform can really be used to create products for any application area within healthcare,” Perugini said.
Presagen is based in Adelaide and has built its global data platform using machine learning and image recognition, aimed at addressing important health issues for women. The startup seeks to have women benefit from the technology being developed, changing otherwise stressful and traumatic processes into something much easier.
Perugini shared on stage her own journey of trying to have children and taking around three years to achieve this, following a raft of treatments with mixed results.
Presagen's journey wasn't without challenges. An early problem was that of data privacy laws forbidding medical data from leaving the country of origin which proved difficult in machine learning. Here AWS’ global cloud infrastructure provided a solution with federated machine learning algorithms, training on data distributed all over the world without having to move or see that data.
