Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The largest ever grant for medical research was recently received by the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. At a staggering 120 million, the grant is to last for 5 years and help create mobile and web applications to collect data from individuals and return them to patients. It is reported to be the largest ever grant to a single researcher at that institute.

The efforts are in line with US President Barrack Obama Administration’s initiative to “re-energize“ the war against cancer. “The National Institutes of Health is making major investments in partnerships across the country, including with the Broad Institute in Cambridge, to gather data that could lead to lifesaving discoveries. Building in strong privacy and security protections from the start, NIH is teaming up with regional health care providers and community-based health clinics to sign up a million or more volunteers from all walks of life. The health, environmental, and lifestyle information this diverse group will provide will be analyzed by qualified scientists to generate new insights and one day bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes,” Obama wrote in the globe.

Grants of USD 4 million were also given to Columbia University Medical Center in New York, Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, the University of Arizona and the University of Pittsburgh. While the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will get its own $4 million initial grant. These centers are in-charge with recruiting study patients.

In fact, the NIH is reported to invest $55 million a year to studying a million American volunteers who have consented to have their bodies put through vigorous tests in finding the genetic workings and environmental risk factors relating to the disease. NIH Director Francis Collins says it “has the potential to truly transform the practice of medicine” and predicts that locating and understanding specifics about the disease will allow doctors to better prevent and treat illness.

In what is said to be an ‘unprecedented effort’, all the data collected from the experiments will be returned back to the study participants.

A combined first year grant of 14 million will be handed out to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.; Verily, the life science arm of Alphabet (formerly Google); and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass who will handle the data analytics for the project. Computer scientist Larry Smarr says he predicts opportunities and obstacles ahead for digital medicine.

“Given the natural variation among people, it is necessary to get personalized data on large numbers of participants to move the precision medicine program forward,” he said in a report in San Diego’s Tribune Union. “Of course, no one person can possibly read through the millions of data sets that will be generated by this program, so there will need to be a parallel effort in data analytics and machine learning to bring the patterns out of the sea of numbers,” he added.

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