A philanthropy created by Facebook Cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, has made healthcare a top priority for its $3 billion initiative. But in a move independent of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Chan and Zuckerberg have donated $10 million to the Institute of Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.
Chan graduated from UCSF School of Medicine.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Led by Dr. Atul Butte, ICHS seeks to use big data to help identify drugs that can be repurposed and which ones will be able to provide better outcomes. It also addresses privacy and security issues for making data from electronic medical records accessible across health systems plugged into the University of California network.
It also addresses privacy and security issues for making data from electronic medical records accessible across health systems plugged into the University of California network. Butte oversees a project that seeks to integrate EHRs from the five medical centers in the University of California system, adding up to records from about 15 million patients.
Butte’s approach with making big data analysis part of the drug research and development process. It involves using publicly available data to gain insights into health and medicine. Those efforts so far, a news release noted, have led to a drug aimed at parasitic worms being retargeted to treat liver cancer. The institute is also assessing other drugs that could be harnessed to treat other forms of cancer. One of the merits of making big data analysis part of pharma r&d is that it has the potential to reduce the cost of drug development. If there were a better system for identifying other uses for drugs that have already received FDA approval, it could shorten the r&d process and significantly reduce costs.
Organizations using big data in support of healthcare is also an area of interest for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Earlier this year, it acquired Toronto-Canada-based startup, Meta. The business uses artificial intelligence to improve the speed at which scientists and clinicians gain access to research relevant to them. Founded by Sam Molyneux —a former University of Toronto cancer genomics researcher — Meta seeks to address a challenge faced by the life science community and others: How to identify and access the articles that they need to read and prioritize them.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative