This landmark partnership between CU Anschutz, UCHealth and Verily is aiming to unlock significant insights from vast datasets.
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Precision health and medicine giant Verily announced today that it will be partnering with CU Anschutz and UCHealth to create an AI enabled ecosystem entailing research ready biomedical pipelines and datasets. In addition, the partnership is aiming to build curated AI models across a variety of specific therapeutic and drug areas, such as oncology, musculoskeletal and transplant medicine, to name a few. All of this work will be done using CU Anschutz’s vast research datasets via Verily Workbench, one of the company’s flagship products.
Workbench is a secure research environment which enables deep analytics for multimodal biomedical data. Importantly, the platform enables researchers to dial into varying degrees of computational analytics, bring structure to multimodal datasets that are otherwise not conducive to insight generation, and most importantly, does all of this with a strong, safe, secure and compliant infrastructure.
RefinedScience is a joint venture between CU Anschutz and UCHealth that will use this technology to bring multiomic datasets together to generate actionable insights. The vision for the group is to produce novel work in discovering new drug targets, improve the drug delivery lifecycle, and holistically design and optimize the clinical trials space.
Kimberly Muller, CIO and vice chancellor of innovation and biotechnology at CU Anschutz, says that her goal is to think broadly about data driven transformation and invite innovation as a means to truly create change. She thoughtfully explains that the technology has huge potential to generate insights from data in a meaningful way, and that creating a steadfast infrastructure that is sustainable is a key aspect of meaningful transformation. In this effort, Verily reflects a mature, tried and tested platform. Muller has previously held some incredibly transformative roles, ranging from her work at CuraGen to leading the ventures group at Yale. At CU Anschutz, she’s hyperfocused on using technology and innovation to improve patient outcomes.
Dr. Erich Huang, M.D., PhD., associate chief clinical officer at Verily, explains that interoperability across datasets is one of the biggest problems in healthcare; what’s truly needed is a commitment to build great infrastructure. He also states that one of the key things about the work with UC and CU Anschutz is the excellent data culture and the resources the organization brings; paired with Verily’s platform, the opportunities for meaningful work are numerous.
Per the company, the partnership has already fostered “over 95% accuracy and 30x faster data extraction versus manual methods.”
Indeed, Verily has made significant efforts in recent years to focus its work on AI and ML driven solutions for its customers. Earlier this year, the company announced its continued work with Vanderbilt University, and overall, supports more than 17,000 registered researchers across the globe.
The company has also become mature enough that there has been a planned spin-off from its parent, Alphabet. In fact, there have been reports that this has already been in the works for some time now, and efforts are well underway to separate infrastructures so that Verily can be fully standalone.
Interoperability is one of the hottest topics in the world of healthcare right now. Studies have found that fewer that one in three providers are currently able to integrate information and data from an outside provider. Experts also indicate that the system is flooded with formats across datasets without a unifying source or incentive to bring them all together, almost like everyone in one room speaking a different language, with no translators.
This is especially difficult when trying to leverage data to create better patient facing products, such as for clinical trials or drug discovery.
Clinical trials optimization and data strategy has been a huge growth sector in recent years, with many players emerging to work on this problem. Take for example Concert AI, which is working on optimizing real world evidence, digital trial solutions and trial optimization. Another example is Phase V, which recently raised nearly $50 million to increase trial success rates and accelerate time to market.
Why is all of this important?
Because the time has never been better for work in this space to truly make a difference. Studies have found that the cost of developing new drugs and therapeutics is on average nearly $170 million dollars. This doesn’t take into account the cost of failures, which drives the cost up to almost $515 million. One of the reasons this process is so expensive is because of the process; per the Office of The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, HHS, “The cost of bringing a medical product to the U.S. market has been increasing and clinical trials constitute a large portion of these costs…Clinical trials contribute significantly to the rising cost trend as they have become more expensive, complex, and lengthier over time.” In the world of clinical trials, data is key, as it is the most valuable aspect of the entire life-cycle. And thanks to new advancements in AI, ML and interoperability solutions, there is now more data available than ever before. This means that real, clinical data with actual clinical context can be better leveraged to improve drug discovery research, development and roll-outs. Ultimately, the hope is that this leads to better products for consumers. Platforms like Verily are conduits in this work by providing the infrastructure to foster this research.