‘Data marketplace’ seeks to apply precision medicine to heart disease

The American Heart Association is collaborating with Amazon Web Services, pharma giant Astra Zeneca and several major research institutes to create the AHA Precision Medicine Platform.

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The American Heart Association has become the latest group to embrace precision medicine, announcing a cloud-based “data marketplace” for promoting collaboration in treatment and research into cardiovascular diseases.

The association is collaborating with Amazon Web Services, pharma giant Astra Zeneca and several major research institutes to create the AHA Precision Medicine Platform. These groups announced the platform at the AHA Scientific Sessions meeting in New Orleans last week.

“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,” AHA CEO Nancy Brown said in a prepared statement. Specifically, they will be starting with coronary heart disease, which Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City called the world’s No. 1 cause of death.

Intermountain is one of the clinical partners in this collaboration, joining the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute, the Dallas Heart Study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the International Stroke Genetics Consortium and the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.

Participants will contribute research data to the Amazon-hosted repository. They also will have access to analytics intended to further both research and treatment of heart disease.

The repository will include genomic, proteomic and gene expression data with longitudinal cohorts, according to the sponsoring organizations.

“By making large numbers of data sources more easily available to researchers, this collaboration will accelerate the movement toward greater openness in clinical research,” Duke Clinical Research Institute Executive Director Dr. Eric Peterson said in a press release. “It will also help speed the development of scientific discoveries into usable treatments for the patients who need them most.”

Dr. Kirk Knowlton, director of cardiovascular research at the Intermountain Heart Institute, said that the platform will “greatly help us as investigators because it will make it much easier to access data and share it with other institutions as we work collaboratively to improve therapies for patients.” MedCity News has reached out to Intermountain for more information and will update this story with further details.

The AHA is taking applications now through http://institute.heart.org/ for grants that will provide researchers and clinicians free access to the platform, including cloud storage and analytics services. The first grantees will be announced in April.

Here is a video about the Precision Medicine Platform, supplied by the AHA.

Photo: Flickr user Desi the Italian voice

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