Elly Yates-Roberts |
Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, research company Verily and Microsoft have partnered to accelerate innovation in biomedicine and help researchers enable vast amounts of data through the organisations’ Terra platform, which enables researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate.
The new partnership will see Microsoft’s cloud, data and artificial intelligence technologies used to support the platform, enabling data scientists, biomedical researchers and clinicians to collaborate in tackling widespread diseases.
“The opportunity to partner with the Broad Institute and Verily in helping researchers around the world understand and treat our toughest human diseases is an honour,” said Gregory Moore, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health Next. “Through this partnership, we will apply the power of Microsoft Azure and its enterprise-grade capabilities in security and privacy, along with cutting-edge data and AI solutions like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, to deliver on the vision of the Terra platform at a new level of scale.”
The partnership will also help increase Terra’s accessibility to over 168,000 partners, and enable secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores.
“Terra simplifies the process so researchers can analyse and share data they have generated, and access and analyse data others have made available without needing to duplicate datasets,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute. “We are thrilled that Microsoft has joined the Terra community and, through this collaboration, we will reduce many more barriers to advancing science and medicine.”