AI-powered precision blood testing may reduce the need for multiple blood tests

This is the goal of Dr. Guillaume Pare and his team at Hamilton Health Sciences, a network of seven hospitals and a clinic based in Ontario, Canada. He and his team have begun trialing the use of AI for “precision” blood tests.

Pare hopes this technology could be used to detect potentially hundreds of biomarkers from just a single blood draw and to offer better, more personalized health insights.

Pare’s startup, Pareon Biosystems, notes that over $134 billion is spent annually on blood tests worldwide, mostly due to the need for multiple blood draws and multiple health insights. An AI-driven approach could reduce this to just one blood draw, massively cutting patient spending, all the while improving diagnostic accuracy and patient care.

“This project has the potential to transform blood testing, much like digital photography replaced film,” said Pare, who currently also serves as the director of Hamilton Health’s Clinical Research Laboratory and Biobank - Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology Laboratory. “[Blood testing is] a massive international market in need of better solutions, and our tests could dramatically decrease this cost.”

“Just three years ago, our tests wouldn’t have been possible,” added Pare. “But rapid advancements in AI have allowed scientists to innovate at a much faster pace.

In a press release, Hamilton Health noted that precision blood testing is an advanced type of test that provides doctors with more specific and personalized insights into a patient’s health by measuring markers like genes, proteins, and other biomarkers for better health and disease risk monitoring.

Traditional blood testing, meanwhile, requires multiple tests, with each test checking for individual diseases and markers. Pare notes that, in North America, an individual may require about 25 blood tests per year, amounting to about 10.5 billion tests each year.

And while one or two tests may not cost too much, when these 25 or so tests are combined, they add up to a significant chunk of an individual’s income.

Pare is looking forward. Not only does he want to reduce the need for multiple blood tests, but he’s also interested in further developments that could make traditionally expensive genetic testing more widely accessible.

“I envision a future where we can identify the risk of most major diseases - early or late onset - at a young age,” he said in an interview with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. “At 20, everyone looks fit; everyone looks healthy. Without genetic testing, it’s really difficult to know who the 20-year-olds are going to be in trouble when they are 50, 60, and 70.”