Mayo Clinic Platform launches first initiative

Its new analytics project will apply AI to deidentified data from Mayo and other health systems to help speed drug discovery and development.
Jeff Rowe

The recently launched data-driven Mayo Clinic Platform has launched its first venture, the Clinical Data Analytics Platform.

Based on a federated architecture, which enables multiple participants to build a common, robust artificial intelligence and machine learning model without sharing datasets, the Clinical Data Analytics Platform will “apply advanced data analytics on deidentified data from Mayo Clinic and other organizations, as well as the vast information in the scientific literature to advance medicine and improve the health of patients.”

The Mayo Clinic Platform was launched this past year as a coordinated approach to create new platform projects and harness emerging technologies – artificial intelligence, connected health devices, natural language processing and more – for care innovations. The initiative aims to build out an ecosystem of partners that will complement Mayo Clinic's clinical capabilities and provide access to scalable solutions.

“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, M.D., Mayo Clinic Platform president, at the time of the new Platform’s launch.

Mayo Clinic has also chosen Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nference, a developer of augmented intelligence technology as its first partner on the Clinical Data Analytics Platform, helping speed drug discovery and development. 

According to Mayo Clinic, the company will focus on identifying targets and biomarkers for new drugs, optimal matching of patients with therapeutic regimen and real-world evidence applications.  

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

Mayo Clinic also noted  “the explosion of new data regarding the biology of disease has far outpaced the human ability to consume and make sense of it, creating a challenge for scientists working to translate biomedical data into new treatments. The novel therapeutic agents identified and created through the power of Clinical Data Analytics Platform have transformative potential to expand treatment options for the most serious or complex illnesses.”

Accordingly,  with an array of new tools, Mayo Clinic aims to develop its research capabilities to find new therapies faster.