01
Science
From research we inherit the duty to claim exactly what the evidence supports. A strong hypothesis and a conclusion are different things, and keeping them apart matters to anyone looking for hope.
Purpose
Ethics by design.
- Grounded in
- Bioethics and corporate responsibility
- Applies to
- Science, data, AI and the company
- Led by
- Chief Purpose Officer
How we think about the meeting point of science, artificial intelligence, the people whose health is at stake and the company we choose to be.
Behind every record is a person who chose to trust us with something intimate.
Whether it can be done, and whether it should.
Bioethics took shape in medicine and research in the second half of the twentieth century, out of a hard lesson: technical progress, on its own, says little about how people are treated. Its four principles anchor our work with patients, data and research.1
- Autonomy
- Each person decides about their own body, their care and their data.
- Beneficence
- Every action seeks the good of the person it affects.
- Non‑maleficence
- Every action is weighed against the harm it could cause.
- Justice
- Benefits, risks and access are distributed fairly.
Neural Omega works with the same material as a hospital: the health of real people. We build digital infrastructure on their data, and computational models to study it. Each of those steps holds an ethical decision, and so does every choice about how we are funded, who we partner with and what we say in public. We make each one deliberately.
Four fields, one responsibility.
Science, artificial intelligence, clinical data and the company itself meet in our work. Each brings its own duty.
02
Artificial intelligence
A model presents its results with a fluency that can read as certainty, and inherits the biases of its data. Its performance must be examined in every population it serves, starting with the least served.
03
Clinical data
What a person shares about their illness is intimate and reaches us through trust. We treat it as a loan, held for the purpose it was given for and under the control of the person who shared it.2
04
The company
How a company is funded, governed and run shapes what it can promise. We choose investors, partners and incentives aligned with the interests of the people we serve, and we hold ourselves to the same standard inside the company as outside it.
Principles prove themselves in the hard decisions.
The ones that cost time, money or attention. These already guide how we work.
- 01
We say what we can defend
One register for everyone: what we would stand behind before a scientific reviewer is what we say to an investor. Every public claim matches its real level of validation, and credibility grows from claims that hold over time.
- 02
Judgement stays with people
Our models propose; experimental evidence and professional judgement decide. Technology is there to strengthen the relationship between patient and clinician, and when a feature invites more trust than the evidence supports, we limit it or remove it, however attractive it may be.
- 03
Data is held in trust
Personal clinical data is used only for the purpose it was given for, and the person keeps real control over it: to see it, take it with them and withdraw it. Data protection is the legal form of an earlier duty, loyalty to whoever trusted us.2
- 04
We design for everyone affected
Nearly four in five people with autoimmune disease are women, and innovation tends to reach the best-served first. We build with representativeness and access in mind from the first decision, and we measure our research by whether it becomes accessible solutions.3
A commitmentrenewed every day.
These tensions are resolved every day, in concrete decisions, and remain open to scrutiny. The commitment binds the team, the leadership, the founders and those who invest in the project alike.
What we promise is demanding: to keep these questions present in every decision, to accept being held to our own words, and to correct course whenever evidence, experience or error shows us we should.
Behind every principle,
a team.
Ethics is sustained by the people who make decisions every day. Meet who builds Neural Omega, and why.
- Beauchamp TL, Childress JF. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 8th ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2019.
- Neural Omega processes personal health data in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), within the European Union.
- Estimate for the United States: 78.8% of people with autoimmune disease are women. Fairweather D, Rose NR. Women and autoimmune diseases. Emerg Infect Dis. 2004;10(11):2005–2011. doi:10.3201/eid1011.040367