Emerging Methods in Data Science: Prospects of Precision Medicine

Abstract

On January 12, 2016, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of a Cancer Moonshot to accelerate cancer research. The initiative—led by Vice President Joe Biden—aims to make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage. In July, 2016, Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has been chosen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be the Data and Research Support Center for the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, a landmark study of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors affecting the health of a million or more people. The NIH will provide $71.6 million to VUMC to establish and operate the center. In this talk, I will introduce the latest development of the US 21st Century Cures bill, NCI Moonshot progress, and the roles of data scientists play in these projects. I will also discuss the base of the Vanderbilt precision medicine - BioVU. BioVU is Vanderbilt's biorepository of DNA extracted from discarded blood collected during routine clinical testing and linked to de-identified medical records in the Synthetic Derivative (SD). The goal of BioVU is to provide a resource to Vanderbilt investigators for studies of genotype-phenotype associations. Planning for BioVU began in mid-2004 and the first samples were collected in February 2007. In December, 2016, BioVU collects more than 225,000 DNA samples with 2.6 million EMR records.