• Oku Digital Health, an AI-driven company, aims to detect diseases early.
• The company is “creating a combined ecosystem that allows one organization to help the other.”

NEW ORLEANS — Oku Digital Health, which was recently launched from Topcon Healthcare, will use a network of more than 10,000 healthcare locations for early disease detection through routine eye exams, according to a press release.

Oculomics is the use of ocular biomarkers to monitor for development of diseases.

At the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting, Ali Tafreshi, CEO of Oku, told Healio that the company’s primary goal is to use this emerging field to address the healthcare cost crisis in the U.S. and globally.

“We’ve been planting the seeds for what we call ‘healthcare from the eye’ for a long time now, and we have the robotic diagnostic devices to automatically capture data at scale within eye care and outside of eye care,” he said. “AI is here to stay, and it can be implemented at scale cost-effectively. It’s now time to bring all that together and turn the eye into the front door of medicine.”

Oku aims to solve “end-to-end problems” from primary care and other specialties to “navigate the patient to the right point of care at the right time for the right therapies,” Tafreshi said.

Oku will bridge its dataset of “17.1 million retinal images, 1.2 million OCT volumes and tokenized longitudinal EHR linkages across 14 health systems covering 146 million exams,” with the goal of accelerating drug development across ocular, cardiovascular, renal, metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases, according to the release. Eligible treatment-naive clinical trial candidates will be flagged during comprehensive eye care and routine primary care visits, as “Oku’s hybrid reading model combines AI and human expert reading to reduce variability, safeguard data integrity, and accelerate regulatory submissions for drugs and devices,” the release said.

“With U.S. patients living an average of 9 miles from one of its sites, Oku’s Harmony solution turns routine eye exams into faster trial candidate identification, recruitment, better retention and scalable real-world evidence,” the release said.

Tafreshi told Healio that this will ensure a faster, more efficient and more cost-effective drug development cycle.

“We’re creating a combined ecosystem that allows one organization to help the other but also the clinical providers to help pharma life sciences and vice versa,” he said.