Mayo Clinic Launches Data Analytics Platform for Drug Development

January 15, 2020 - Mayo Clinic has announced the Clinical Data Analytics Platform as the first venture under the Mayo Clinic Platform, an initiative to use insights and knowledge extracted from data to improve healthcare and accelerate new treatments.

The Clinical Data Analytics Platform will apply innovative analytics technologies to deidentified data from Mayo Clinic and other organizations, as well as the wide range of information in the scientific literature to advance medicine and improve patient health.

The Clinical Data Analytics Platform is based on a federated architecture, enabling multiple participants to build a common artificial intelligence and machine learning model without sharing datasets, addressing issues such as data privacy, security, and access rights to heterogeneous sources of data.

Mayo Clinic is partnering with nference, an augmented intelligence company, to accelerate drug development and development across the biopharmaceutical sector. Together, the organizations will identify targets and biomarkers for new drugs, optimal matching of patients with treatment regimens, and real-world data and drug applications, including label expansion and postmarketing surveillance.

nference will combine its proprietary knowledge synthesis platform with the clinical expertise of physicians and researchers at Mayo Clinic.

“Platform business models have been a force of disruption in many sectors, and the rapid digitalization of health care is affording us an unprecedented opportunity to solve complex medical problems and improve lives of people on a global scale,” said John Halamka, MD, Mayo Clinic Platform president.

There is an enormous amount of data regarding the biology of disease, far outpacing the human ability to consume and make sense of it, which is challenging for scientists working to translate biomedical data into treatments.

Through the Clinical Data Analytics Platform, researchers will be able to create and identify novel therapeutic agents that will have transformative potential to expand treatment options for the most serious or complex diseases. Mayo Clinic will use these new tools to advance its research capabilities and unlock massive datasets to find new therapies faster.

“For more than a century, our patients have entrusted us with their biomedical information, with the knowledge that Mayo Clinic would use it to advance the science of medicine. Advanced data and technology capabilities offer great potential to not just improve the health of patients through the treatment of disease but to prevent and cure it,” said Clark Otley, MD, chief medical officer for the Mayo Clinic Platform.

Mayo Clinic launched the Mayo Clinic Platform last year. The platform is a coordinated portfolio approach to create new platform ventures and leverage emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, connected healthcare devices, and natural language processing.

The Mayo Clinic is designed to include an ecosystem of partners that will complement Mayo Clinic’s clinical capabilities and provide access to scalable solutions.

By partnering with nference, Mayo Clinic will advance treatment research and protect patient privacy.

“The creation of an expansive platform of deidentified clinical and molecular data that places patient privacy first, is imperative for leveraging institutional knowledge. Our technology makes the predominantly unstructured biomedical knowledge computable, facilitating the discovery and development of new therapeutics,” said Murali Aravamudan, co-founder and chief executive officer, nference.