PaperFree partner Microsoft recently shared news of how its Azure cloud product is being used to share and analyze data that researchers have collected in an effort to solve the mysteries of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and childhood cancers.
Microsoft's first partnership, with Seattle Children's Research Institute, aims to draw understanding about the causes of SIDS and hopefully methods to prevent it. This cause is close to the Microsoft family - chief data analytics officer John Kahan lost his son to it. The team at Microsoft started their task with public data about 26 million births and deaths, and then studied nearly 100 parameters about every child born in the US over a six year span. With the help of the Azure platform, the team were able to make several important connections between datasets and increased chances of SIDS occurring. Then, the data was handed over to the Seattle Children's Research Institute for expert analysis.
This team effort has since resulted in an impressive collaborative genomics database between Seattle Children's and Microsoft data scientists. This database is also shared with top SIDS researchers around the world. The result of this partnership has been a peer-reviewed paper published in the medical journal Pediatrics - in which researchers were able to make a connection between SIDS and maternal smoking during pregnancy. Azure advanced modeling techniques were used to draw this conclusion, and the researchers hope to use sequenced whole genomes as additional data in their Azure platform. Ultimately, Azure may be a key tool in finally understanding the mystery of SIDS and how to prevent it.
Azure is also in use for pediatric cancer research. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital recently developed the St. Jude Cloud with the help of Microsoft and DNAnexus. This platform works to make genomics data sharing and collaboration much easier between researchers. By developing the platform to analyze data against the human genome template, connections can be more easily made. Now, 450 institutions across 16 countries have instant access to critical research data to help them solve childhood cancer.
Microsoft's developments are in nearly every medical office and research institution, offering them a unique opportunity to create effective cloud and AI-based solutions for healthcare needs and research.
This article was based on a May 21, 2019 Microsoft blog post by Peter Lee