Microsoft accelerates next-gen health & life science
In an announcement made by Microsoft, Broad Institute and Verily, the three organisations have entered into a multi year partnership with Broad Institute and Verily to accelerate the next generation of the Terra platform for health and life science research.
As part of the partnership the three plan to accelerate innovations in biomedicine via the Terra platform. Terra was originally developed by Verily and the Broad Institute, it is a secure, scalable, open source platform for biomedical researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate.
“The opportunity to partner with the Broad Institute and Verily in helping researchers around the world understand and treat our toughest human diseases is an honor. Through this partnership, we will apply the power of Microsoft Azure and its enterprise-grade capabilities in security and privacy, along with cutting-edge data and AI solutions like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, to deliver on the vision of the Terra platform at a new level of scale,” commented Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., corporate vice president of Microsoft Health Next.
This new partnership between Microsoft, Broad Institute and Verily aims to break through barriers by bringing together Microsoft;s cloud, data, AI technologies and global network to accelerate the development of global biomedical research, providing greater access and empower the open source community.
As part of the partnership the three organisations will:
- Expand Terra’s open, modular and interoperable research platform
- Increase Terra’s accessibility to the more than 168,000 health and life sciences organisations
- Enable secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores
- Allow access to a growing portfolio of open and proprietary standards-based tools, best practices workflows and APIs
- Enable federated data analysis
- Create seamless and secure flow to speed the delivery of data and insights
- Use open APIs and modular components to advance the standards-based biomedical data ecosystem
“We’re pleased to be working with Microsoft and Broad on this initiative. Our three organizations share the goals of improving patient care, driving innovation in biomedical research, and lowering costs across healthcare and life sciences. This partnership combines multimodal data, secure analytics and scalable cloud computing to improve insight and evidence generation, allowing us to ultimately impact more patients’ lives,” commented Stephen Gillett, chief operating officer at Verily.
“Both Microsoft and Verily share our vision for Terra as an open and collaborative ecosystem for the sharing and analysis of biomedical data. This partnership will allow us to make Terra even more useful and accessible across a broader set of researchers and industries,” added Clare Bernard, senior director of the Broad Institute Data Sciences Platform and product manager of the Terra platform.
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