STRATA+HADOOP WORLD NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudera , the global provider of the fastest, easiest, and most secure data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and the latest open source technologies, today announced it has approved the first set of applications received through its own Cloudera Precision Medicine Initiative in support of President Obama’s national Precision Medicine Initiative to advance the use of data and analytics in precision medicine. With support from the company’s Precision Medicine Advisory Council, Cloudera announces Baylor College of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Irell & Manella School of Biology at the City of Hope Medical Center, the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami and the Georgia Tech Research Institute will all receive grants of enterprise-class big data software and training to help drive health insights from merging multi-omic and phenotype data at the patient level.
"Unleashing the power of data through open community and collaboration is the right approach to solve a complex problem like precision medicine," said DJ Patil, Chief Data Scientist, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "Initiatives like this one, which break data silos and share data in an open platform across industries, may speed genomics-based research and ultimately save lives."
To be chosen for the grant, applicants must be research labs within a United States’ institute of higher education, have a precision medicine research lab and undergo a successful review by the company’s advisory committee. Cloudera looks for precision medicine research that includes genotype, phenotype, environment and other data sets that may result in some translational result in the future and which can demonstrate specific applications for precision medicine research.
Cloudera’s commitment to grant software and training was announced in February as part of the White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit. Aside from providing training to 1,000 precision medicine researchers in the latest big data technologies and data science techniques, Cloudera committed to donate subscriptions to its big data software and training services to 50 institutions working in the field.
“Cloudera believes the capacity for precision medicine research to fundamentally change disease diagnosis and treatment starts with data coming from genomics, environment, patient history and more,” said Mike Olson, Cloudera Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. “Making our first set of software and training grants means that these organizations can start to utilize big data tools to store, process and analyze copious amounts of data in the field. We are absolutely confident that data will drive advances in the field, and we are pleased to be supporting the White House Precision Medicine Initiative and with these institutions to make that happen.”
Cloudera plans to open the next round of applications via web submittal in early November. For more information on the application process and details, please visit: www.cloudera.com/about-cloudera/precision-medicine-initiative.html
Additional Quotes
"The HGSC is pleased to continue our history of translational innovation as a member of Cloudera's Precision Medicine Initiative,” said Will Salerno, Ph.D, director of translational medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing Center. “As our newly founded clinical lab ramps up to meet the challenges of the NIH eMERGE, UDN and CSER programs, we will translate our success in building a research Data Commons into the clinical space. This will pose specific technical challenges for PHI protection, EMR/EHR integration and rapid analytic turn-around times. "
“The research we will do in women’s and children’s health will increasingly require big data,” said Alicia Smith Ph.D, Vice Chair of Ob/Gyn Research at Emory University School of Medicine. “Cloudera’s grant will enable our continued bioinformatic efforts to identify genetic and epigenetic predictors of patient health.”
“Our precision medicine teams are working together to develop individualized treatments in cancer, diabetes, HIV and other life threatening diseases. Our goal—using our samples and public resources such as NCI TCGA pan-cancer patient cohort studies—is to provide scientific insights and expertise to identify patient populations early, to prevent late stage treatment failures and side effects, and enable pre-clinical studies and early phase clinical trials,” said Yate-Ching Yuan, Ph.D, associate research professor and bioinformatics core director at Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biology at City of Hope Medical Center. “At our cancer center, we are scaling up the volume and precision of our findings, creating the translational link, and enabling clinicians to use our research—big data is key.”
“In our Systems Drug Discovery research group we integrate and model small molecule-protein interaction, systems biology ‘omics’, and chemistry data with the goal to improve translation of disease models into novel functional small molecules. Our group is part of national research Consortia: Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) project, the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program, Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) program. We are excited to explore the Cloudera platform as a foundation for our big data analytics efforts,” said Stephan Schürer, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Department of Pharmacology, Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami.
"In order to provide the best results for precision medicine, genomic data must be merged with longitudinal clinical data. Georgia Tech’s research focuses on using the OMOP standard to make these linkages and on scaling up to large quantities of data. To reach this goal we are making use of open data and big data platforms such as Spark and Hadoop, and our partnership with Cloudera will help streamline our infrastructure deployment and management of resources," said Jason Poovey, branch head of HPC and Data Analytics at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
About Cloudera
Cloudera delivers the modern data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and the latest open source technologies. The world’s leading organizations trust Cloudera to help solve their most challenging business problems with Cloudera Enterprise, the fastest, easiest and most secure data platform available for the modern world. Our customers efficiently capture, store, process and analyze vast amounts of data, empowering them to use advanced analytics to drive business decisions quickly, flexibly and at lower cost than has been possible before. To ensure our customers are successful, we offer comprehensive support, training and professional services. Learn more at http://cloudera.com .
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