Harnessing AI and Digital Sensors for Dynamic Biological Insights: A Reflection on DIVA’s Progress
This excitement and opportunity was the backdrop for the Digital In Vivo Alliance’s (DIVA) recent annual face-to-face meeting in Redwood City, CA. You won’t be surprised to learn that many of the faces were in the room where we met while others were virtually present via Zoom. Though often less-than-satisfying for participants, those who attended virtually were engaged, actively participated, and presented. This meeting was the third such event for DIVA since our launch nearly 2 years ago and was particularly meaningful since we’re at an important inflection point in our efforts. It was a significant success from my perspective.
DIVA was launched as a collaboration of scientists with mutual interest in leveraging rapid advances in digital sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to improve the way we do animal studies. We’ve spent the last couple of years aligning on our strategic intent, nominating digital measures that we think will be useful for drug developers, designing and executing studies to support ML-algorithm development, designing a validation framework, and beginning to share the outcomes of our efforts. Our meeting was an opportunity to reflect on our progress, recognize our learnings, and look forward to a DIVA 2.0.
It was clear that we’ve made significant progress in advancing our foundational portfolio of digital measures represented by the data-rich presentations we heard. That portfolio includes algorithms that enable us to detect and track individual mice with increasing accuracy and efficiency; screen for seizure-related behaviors; measure respiration; and segment activity at levels of resolution that will allow us to quantify locomotory movement, infer sleep, and a host of activity patterns that we’ve yet to explore. We’re applying a rigorous validation protocol to these measures and are exploring novel ways of representing and analyzing these unique measures. We are clearly on the bleeding edge of developing a valuable analytical capability that could transform the way we do animal studies.
Despite our laurels, we recognized that those laurels must add value by addressing fundamental challenges in drug development to support decisions to continue to invest in DIVA and the technologies supporting our digital measures. Accordingly, we spent time talking about what unique values our digital measures might bring that could improve clinical translation, bring process efficiencies, and optimize animal welfare. I think the values are there. It’s time for us to articulate them and support them with evidence from the studies we’ve executed.
Lastly, we discussed how to organizationally evolve DIVA to maintain our momentum. For real impact and to become a standard of practice, we’ll need to recruit and engage a much broader stakeholder group. To maintain and speed our progress, we’ll need to develop more strategic collaborations and leverage a broader set of resources. Transformative innovation doesn’t generally come from individuals but from collaborative teams of people with a common interest and vision. I think we have that in DIVA.
As a veterinarian, I think we owe it to the research animals we study to maximize the benefit of that study to advance both human and animal health. As a scientist, I think we leave useful information on the table if we don’t collect as much data as we can from the studies we conduct. As a drug developer, I think we can do better than we do in translating what we learn preclinically to clinical success. As a potential patient, I have a vested interest in every opportunity to improve our ability to develop safe and effective therapies. As the Chair of DIVA, I welcome the opportunity to continue to work with, support, and learn from this dedicated and creative group of scientists to accomplish all these things.
DIVA is an exemplar for how to collaboratively and strategically engage, develop, and apply novel technologies to solve contemporary problems and support the important work of biomedical science. We’ve established our foundation and built momentum. We’ve clearly identified the problems we want to solve and have guided developers to build solutions that align to those problems. I’m confident that we’ll maintain and even speed our progress throughout the remainder of this year and those to come.
I’m fortunate to be a member of this team and contributor to this effort. I hope they let me stay. 😊
Brian Berridge, DVM, PhD, DACVP
DIVA Chair
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