Intermountain Joins Cloud-Based Precision Medicine Data Initiative to Accelerate Scientific Discovery and Research for Heart Care

Intermountain Healthcare’s Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute, one of the leading cardiovascular research and clinical treatment centers in the country, is participating in this initiative as a platform data partner at the invitation of the American Heart Association. 

Other healthcare and research organizations are participating as data contributors to the AHA Precision Medicine Platform include: AstraZeneca, Cedars Sinai Heart Institute, Dallas Heart Study, Duke Clinical Research Institute, the International Stroke Genetics Consortium, and the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute. 

The goal: enhance the way cardiovascular researchers and clinicians collaborate and analyze rich and diverse research data to accelerate solutions for cardiovascular diseases. 

The AHA Precision Medicine Platform, which was announced last week at the AHA 2016 Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, will include a vast array of curated rich datasets, that are centrally stored, easily searched and accessible, and managed on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

“This platform will greatly help us as investigators because it will make much easier to access data and share it with other institutions as we work collaboratively to improve therapies for patients,” said Kirk Knowlton, MD, director of cardiovascular research at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute.

This platform will enable researchers and clinicians to aggregate and analyze a rich breadth and depth of data including longitudinal cohorts, proteomic, genomic, and gene expression data using a precision medicine approach to uncover critical cardiovascular disease insights that translate into medical innovations that positively impact millions of lives.

Precision cardiovascular medicine takes into account an individual’s biology, environment and lifestyle and is driven by advanced methods of aggregating, integrating and analyzing patient data to develop prevention and treatment strategies for individuals.

Derived from the fullest possible range of biological and environmental factors relevant to a patient’s cardiovascular health, the platform will integrate data from clinical trials, long-running epidemiologic studies, clinical registries, and real-time health data acquired through wearable devices and technology.

“The platform will harness the power of big data to revolutionize the way cardiovascular research is performed and speed the promise of precision cardiovascular medicine,” said Nancy Brown, chief executive officer of the American Heart Association. “The AHA remains steadfast in its commitment to eliminate the tragic global burden cardiovascular disease places on individuals, families, healthcare systems, and entire nations by mapping scientific discovery to the dramatic advances in biomedical research and technology innovation.”

Amazon Web Services, a leading cloud services provider, provides the computational and analytic power needed to manage an information ecosystem of this magnitude. Cloud computing is already accelerating scientific progress throughout academia, industry and government, helping to forge new models of open science, collaboration and discovery. Through a cloud-based infrastructure, the Precision Medicine Platform will advance our community of researchers together. to find solutions for patients.

To spark the collaboration, the American Heart Association is providing access to the Precision Medicine Platform through a series of grants. Amazon Web Services is providing grant recipients free access to computational cloud storage and analysis as part of the AHA data grant portfolio. 

Grant submissions are in progress and the first round of recipients will be announced in April 2017. The Precision Medicine Platform will be available at https://precision.heart.org/ and is a marquee project of the AHA Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine. Additional information can be found at http://institute.heart.org. 

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