MD Anderson Cancer Center, Syntropy and the Foundry Platform have entered into a technology collaboration to grow data science capabilities.
Building upon MD Anderson’s institution’s digital infrastructure, the Foundry platform adds to MD Anderson’s growing ability to contextually integrate and draw clinically meaningful insights from vast quantities of data, including clinical, biospecimen, imaging, and other sources, while assuring appropriate use and data protections through state-of-the-art provenance and access controls.
By assembling and harmonizing the diverse data types and making them “similar” enough to analyze while highlighting their unique differences, MD Anderson researchers are able to more effectively find data and collaborate on research.
Hundreds of collaborators across diverse disciplines at MD Anderson already have conducted more than 50 projects in Foundry, with an initial focus on COVID-19 and its impact on cancer patients. Recognizing an urgent need to rapidly address research questions at the start of the pandemic, MD Anderson enabled its researchers to leverage the Foundry platform to generate insights from a common, curated, readily available source of aggregated COVID-19 data for cancer patients.
Research from this work will be presented at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in June.
Through ongoing education and implementation efforts, MD Anderson will be conducting a strategic and systematic rollout to additional researchers on the platform and expanding access throughout the institution.
Additional opportunities exist to explore secure data collaborations with other academic and industry partners. MD Anderson also has submitted grant proposals using Foundry as an enabling platform for collaboration.
