- Addenbrooke’s Hospital Taps Microsoft for AI Technology
Additionally, Microsoft’s cloud, data, and artificial intelligence technologies will help to advance the ability of data sciences, biomedical researchers, and clinicians globally to combat the most complex diseases today.
“The opportunity to partner with the Broad Institute and Verily in helping researchers around the world understand and treat our toughest human diseases is an honor,” Gregory Moore, MD, PhD, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health Next, said in the announcement.
“Through this partnership, we will apply the power of Microsoft Azure and its enterprise-grade capabilities in security and privacy, along with cutting-edge data and AI solutions like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, to deliver on the vision of the Terra platform at a new level of scale,” Moore continued.
Biomedical data are being generated and digitized at a “historic rate,” including genomics, medical imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. These data can provide vital insights into some of the most pressing health issues around the world.
By 2025, biomedical data is expected to reach dozens of exabytes, Microsoft said. Exabytes are used to measure the sum of multiple storage networks in a certain amount of time.
But making use of these important datasets is difficult for researchers who face siloed data estates, disparate tools, fragmented systems and data standards, and varying governance and security policies, Microsoft stated.
The Broad-Verily-Microsoft partnership will bring together technology experts, science researchers, and data scientists to introduce various initiatives and combat these challenges.
Overall, these initiatives will aim to boost Terra’s overall vision for health and life sciences.
“Our three organizations share the goals of improving patient care, driving innovation in biomedical research, and lowering costs across healthcare and life sciences,” said Stephen Gillett, chief operating officer at Verily. “This partnership combines multimodal data, secure analytics and scalable cloud computing to improve insight and evidence generation, allowing us to ultimately impact more patients’ lives.”
First, the companies will expand on Terra’s open, modular and interoperable research platform through Microsoft Azure cloud, data, artificial intelligence technologies, and global capabilities.
Then, they will ensure secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores, ensure access to growing portfolios of open and proprietary standards-based tools, best practices, workflows, and APIs, and enable data analysis to uncover insights and build useful predictive models.
Using APIs and modular components will help to align the standards-based biomedical data ecosystem with the open approach to data, Microsoft said.
And lastly, the companies will create a seamless and secure work-flow to quicken the delivery of data and insights between research and clinical domains.
“Terra simplifies the process so researchers can analyze and share data they have generated, and access and analyze data others have made available without needing to duplicate datasets,” said Eric S. Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
“Terra is designed to work across many different types of biomedical information — moving aside barriers to storage, permissions and computing to enable collaboration and generate insights. Through this collaboration, we will reduce many more barriers to advancing science and medicine,” Lander concluded.
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