‘Data Marketplace’ Seeks to Apply Precision Medicine to Heart Disease

Neil Versel | MedCity News | November 21, 2016

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...