Highlighting an unprecedented partnership to advance the power of big data in medicine, University of California San Francisco, together with data giant Google, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Institute for Systems Biology, has been granted the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Award. This award testifies to the national importance given to “Harness the Data Revolution” by engaging partnerships between public and private sectors and converging their research efforts. While a total of twenty-one awards were announced, UCSF is the only one targeting a wide spectrum of biomedicine and health.
The award-winning project will be led by Sergio Baranzini, PhD, Professor of Neurology at UCSF, in collaboration with Sharat Israni, PhD, Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer of Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
SPOKE is also an active contributor to the NIH NCATS Biomedical Translator, a program that visualizes that reclassification of diseases based on molecular pathophysiology or molecular etiology would lead to better treatments. Mining biomedical research and clinical data collectively should provide insights into the relationship between molecular and cellular processes (the targets of rational drug design) and the signs and symptoms of diseases. SPOKE, an existing rich knowledge network with such data, combined with ISB’s body of multi-omics data on thousands of individuals (genomic, proteomic, RNA sequences), make for a strong basis for Biomedical Translator. This project, after a multi-year feasibility phase, entered the Development phase in 2020. Sui Huang (Institute for Systems Biology, PI) and Sergio Baranzini (co-PI) won an award grant.
SPOKE is also validating its findings in clinical decision support, partnering with UCSF’s BRIDGE point-of-care platform. Together with the clinical evidence base in UCSF’s Information Commons, SPOKE and BRIDGE form a full-loop pilot Learning Healthcare System. The pilot was funded by the Marcus Program in Precision Medicine at UCSF.
SPOKE is funded by:
National Science Foundation (NSF)
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)