Today, DJ Patil, United States Chief Data Scientist, announced the first five organizations receiving technology and training from Cloudera for continued support in working on the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).
Cloudera announced its commitment to grant software and training in February as part of the White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit.
“Unleashing the power of data through open community and collaboration is the right approach to solve a complex problem like precision medicine,” said Patil, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “Initiatives like this one, which break data silos and share data in an open platform across industries, may speed genomics-based research and ultimately save lives.”
The first recipients are:
- Baylor College of Medicine.
- Emory University School of Medicine.
- Irell & Manella School of Biology at the City of Hope Medical Center.
- The Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami.
- The Georgia Tech Research Institute.
These research labs will receive big data software and training from Cloudera to help their work on the PMI, specifically driving insights from merging multi-omic and phenotype data at the patient level.
“In order to provide the best results for precision medicine, genomic data must be merged with longitudinal clinical data. Georgia Tech’s research focuses on using the OMOP standard to make these linkages and on scaling up to large quantities of data. To reach this goal we are making use of open data and big data platforms such as Spark and Hadoop, and our partnership with Cloudera will help streamline our infrastructure deployment and management of resources,” said Jason Poovey, branch head of HPC and Data Analytics, Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Applicants are research labs within a United States higher education institute, have a lab specifically for precision medicine, and successfully pass a review from Cloudera’s advisory committee. The labs must also be working on projects with specific applications for precision medicine, including any focus on genotypes, phenotypes, and environment.
“Cloudera believes the capacity for precision medicine research to fundamentally change disease diagnosis and treatment starts with data coming from genomics, environment, patient history, and more,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Cloudera. “Making our first set of software and training grants means that these organizations can start to utilize big data tools to store, process and analyze copious amounts of data in the field. We are absolutely confident that data will drive advances in the field, and we are pleased to be supporting the White House Precision Medicine Initiative and with these institutions to make that happen.”
The next round of applications will open in early November.
