WHAT is SPOKE?

Scalable Precision Medicine Open Knowledge Engine. A database of databases.

WHY SPOKE?

The true nature of biology and the complex interactions present in human health, disease, and medical treatment are best represented as pathways, or node-arc graphs, in which “nodes” model the layers that make up a human (genetics, epigenomics, proteins, tissues, organs, clinical phenotypes, environment, lifestyle, etc.), and “arcs” represent the various types of relationships amongst them. SPOKE offers a graph-theoretic database that will allow researchers to explore these interconnected pathways, enabling new discoveries.

SPOKE affords a wide variety of applications: suggesting testable hypotheses and new conceptual syntheses for researchers, implicating mechanisms of disease for researchers and clinicians, and enabling more precise diagnoses and treatments for individual patients. 

SPOKE pulls data out of silos, connecting the wealth of information that already exists from basic molecular research, clinical insights, environmental data and others.  Current data includes 19 databases such as LINCS, GWAS Catalog, ChemBL, DrugBank, SIDER and iRefIndex. The clinical insight sources include UCSF’s large data store of de-identified patient clinical data.  SPOKE continuously acquires new data – from laboratory experiments and clinical trials to electronic health records and pedometer readings – to better inform our collective understanding of health.