The platform enables medical researchers to rise to the challenge of delivering actionable insights and testable hypotheses, quickly and securely.
In medical and population health research, the Dexter platform delivers insights from large healthcare datasets in minutes, reducing the time needed for epidemiology studies, drug safety and effectiveness studies, clinical audits, clinical trials.
The platform is based on a software developed by Professor Krishnarajah Nirantharakumar, Dr Krishna Gokhale and Professor Joht Singh Chandan, at Birmingham’s Department of Applied Health Sciences.
Professor Nirantharakumar, now based at King’s College London, will be Dexter’s chief scientific officer, Dr Gokhale its chief technology officer, and Professor Chandan, who became the UK’s youngest Clinical Professor in 2024, its chief medical officer.
Prof Nirantharakumar said: “Dexter was originally developed at the University of Birmingham to make health data research faster, more accessible and more reproducible.
“Since then, it has enabled more than 150 studies, including publications in Nature Medicine, The Lancet journals and the BMJ.
“Most importantly, it has helped democratise access to large-scale health data research, supporting over 100 early-career researchers and contributing to more than £30 million in research funding.”
Dexter AI Ltd will be led by CEO Christian Billinghurst, who has worked with the team over several years while Dexter incubated in a University of Birmingham Enterprise commercialisation programme, and transitioned from an academic project to a commercial venture.
During this time, the platform has been used in more than 150 high-profile peer-reviewed studies, including work identifying the full spectrum of symptoms associated with Long COVID.
It has also generated important evidence to inform the management of common health conditions such as thyroid disorders and atrial fibrillation, and supported data-enabled clinical trials from planning and feasibility assessment through to recruitment, outcome evaluation and safety monitoring
CEO Christian Billinghurst said: “Dexter has proven transformative in a university setting, contributing to the department’s growth in scale, impact and grant success. Our move into industry through the University has enabled us to build key partnerships while evolving Dexter into an industry-ready platform tested across diverse data types.”
The researchers wanted to quicken the labour-intensive and time-consuming process of extracting data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which hold huge un-tapped potential for health researchers.
During incubation with University of Birmingham Enterprise, the Dexter team developed a web-based application that users can take to their data, which means data can be extracted and analysed securely without the risks involved in moving data from one platform to another.
The team also developed partnerships with several industry partners including IQVIA, Cegedim Health Data and Adelphi Real World, to reduce the time and cost of Real World Evidence studies, identify suitable participants for clinical trials from electronic patient records, and conduct population health-based research.
Christian Billinghurst said: “We have demonstrated our platform can support a wide range of different studies, from incidence and prevalence analysis and cohort building to clinical trial emulation, pharmacoepidemiology, even the automation of clinical audits.”
Dexter has ambitions beyond healthcare and is now looking at applications involving justice data and social inequality, where its technology platform could be used to handle diverse datasets.
