Oxford Brain Diagnostics saves 60% on infrastructure costs with OVHcloud, helping to optimise platform for superior diagnoses of Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative conditions
OVHcloud & Oxford Brain Diagnostics
60% cost savings compared to previous provider
Supportive start-up community
Fast, reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure
Executive summary
Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD) is on a mission to change the way the world thinks about brain health. The team’s technology assesses brain health based on changes in the cellular structure, helping to support drug development and aid clinicians around the world in their fight to defeat Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders.
Dr Steven Chance and Professor Mark Jenkinson developed OBD’s Cortical Disarray Measurement (CDM®) technology while they were professors at the University of Oxford, spinning the concept out into a commercial business.
Steven Chance (CEO, Co-Founder) said “Our vision is to bring a unique tool that explains brain disease for the world’s health systems. Neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s have a huge global unmet need for improved diagnosis. To support the execution of that vision, OBD will seek out partnerships that help us to achieve global scale across our portfolio of products.”
OBD’s patented products provide unparalleled insights into the human brain and are currently used by multiple large pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses to help assess neurodegeneration and drug response in clinical trials. The team’s clinical product, CDM Insights, has both US (FDA 510k) and UKCA regulatory clearance.
The challenge
OBD’s products can process thousands of scans at any time, in any location, providing health professionals with a greater understanding of the microstructural health of the human brain. The solution is fully automated and has built-in redundancy to enable it to resist outages.
The technology has enormous potential for helping to identify neurodegenerative disorders earlier than other methods, but the previous infrastructure requirements of the platform were limiting that potential. Historically, the OBD team had hosted their infrastructure with two large hyperscale cloud providers. However, the company’s goal was a cross-platform, multi-cloud approach, ensuring agility, speed of delivery and portability from the get-go.
“I ran a technology company for years before joining OBD and had ideas for how we could scale. We’d been looking for a new provider and found OVHcloud. OVHcloud’s startup program was a good fit for us, and the team was very supportive with both cloud credits and bringing us into their community.”
Ian Hardingham, CTO - Oxford Brain Diagnostics
The nature of OBD’s products meant that the team needed both high-availability storage and the ability to scale quickly and easily. Reliability and speed were crucial, as well as fair and transparent pricing once any credits had been used.
The solution
Oxford Brain Diagnostics chose OVHcloud’s public cloud instances for their data storage and compute, specifically for the clinical trial work and associated storage. The solution remains multi-platform, with the US FDA-approved work still using a hyperscale cloud platform.
Privacy and security are paramount, and data is anonymised before it leaves the clinician environment. It is encrypted in motion and at rest, and the team conducts thorough risk analyses in addition to complying with regulatory requirements including GDPR and HIPAA.
“It was quite easy to switch over to OVHcloud technology,” continued Hardingham. “It took a little bit of time to get used to the new interface and to optimise how OVHcloud linked with some of the hyperscale cloud platforms, but we got it working quickly. We did experiment with a couple of different cloud instance types, and with some advice from support we were able to optimise our setup.”
The result
The Oxford Brain Diagnostics team is now saving approximately 60% on its cloud costs compared to its previous hyperscale cloud instances, for a comparable level of infrastructure performance.
“We get great service at a great price with OVHcloud,” continued Hardingham. “The team is very collaborative, and the support from the startup program has been great. The events help us to network and make it easy to get to know other founders in the ecosystem.”
“It’s been a real pleasure working with Ian and the team,” said Cezary Skarsynski, Startup Program Manager, OVHcloud. “OBD’s technology is already having an incredible impact on people around the world, and we’re very proud to be helping to support the business in any way we can.”
Although the US and UK are the primary markets for the Oxford Brain
Diagnostics team, they are also looking at Asia and Europe and considering how the technology could be rolled out globally in the coming years. The technology is currently being used in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies, and the team are in discussions with a number of clinical organisations in the US.
“It’s good to know that the infrastructure ‘just works’, allowing us to focus on expanding into other markets and looking to the future,” concluded Chance. “We’re always thinking about what’s next and are currently looking at differential diagnoses of dementias. This technology could have an enormous impact on ensuring that people get the right help and support they need, at the right time, and we’re very proud to be helping to change lives for the better with our work.”
