An AI spinout from Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has completed a seed round to help accelerate the translation of AI from research to clinical care.
Cascader, a partnership between Moorfields, Topcon Healthcare, and UCL Ventures, is a medical technology company applying AI in the field of oculomics, and in the detection and management of eye disease. According to the company website, its ambitions are to ensure patients and clinicians are able to benefit sooner from innovations in eye care, medical imaging, and data science.
Late in 2025, HTN was joined by Pete Thomas, CEO of Cascader, for a webinar on AI in practice, during which Pete shared details of the company’s collaboration with Google DeepMind. The partnership paved the way for data research platform INSIGHT, featuring 35 million ophthalmic images, as well as associated diagnostic and metadata, as the biggest bioresource for ophthalmology in the world. The INSIGHT Eye and Oculomics Health Data Research Hub will now be used to support the development of AI at Cascader through secure access to curated datasets.
The initial focus will be on macular diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, Cascader states, with a long term ambition to develop a broader portfolio of AI tools for use across the eye care pathway. The seed funding will help advance products toward market launch, with plans also to expand the company team.
Pearse Keane, Cascader co-founder and consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, said: “After more than a decade of developing pioneering AI and advancing the field of oculomics, we are fully focused on moving these technologies from research into real-world clinical care. Our AI will lead to earlier diagnosis and earlier treatment, saving people’s sight, both in the UK and around the world.”
Wider trend: Health AI
The National Commission into the Regulation of AI has put forward a series of recommendations for a future regulatory framework, finding strong support for the use of AI in healthcare being “conditional, rather than automatic”. The central conclusion, the commission goes on, is that future regulation needs to be more proportionate, lifecycle-based, and system-wide. “Current approaches were largely designed for products that are more static and easier to reliably assess at a single point in time,” it states. “AI-enabled products may iterate rapidly, perform differently in different settings and depend on the data, workflows, people and organisations around them.”
An AI spin-out from the University of Birmingham has launched, with an aim to speed up the process of extracting data from EHRs to support medical researchers and reduce the time for drug safety and effectiveness studies. Dexter AI is based on a software developed by a team from the Birmingham Department of Applied Health Sciences, Professor Krishnarajah Nirantharakumar, Dr Krishna Gokhale, and Professor Joht Singh Chandan. Its website outlines the potential for use in the design of epidemiological studies, cohort identification, emulating clinical trials with real world data, automating clinical audits, and enabling population health management.
Cognita Imaging, a subsidiary of Mosaic Clinical Technologies, has been awarded a $1.2 million contract by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test a new approach for evaluating AI-generated radiology reports. The project will see the use of multiple large language models (LLMs) to “work as a jury” in assessing AI-generated reports across around a million patient exams, according to Mosaic. Cognita’s role will be the development and validation of a framework incorporating several LLMs to check human and AI-generated radiology reports, comparing the judgement of the models to produce a more consistent evaluation.
