Stanford, Google Genomics team up on precision medicine

Stanford Medicine is teaming up with Google Genomics for its new Clinical Genomics Service, which aims to make genetic testing a normal part of healthcare and as simple for doctors as ordering blood work.

The partnership will allow developers to build cloud-based applications for exploring massive sets of healthcare data in an effort to make precision medicine more of a reality, according to a Stanford announcement.

It will use the Google cloud platform to store, process and share genomic datasets. Sequencing will take a fraction of the time it takes now and empower physicians to make better, more personalized medical decisions, according to a Google blog post.

Stanford clinicians will be able to order genome sequencing, when warranted, that will be compared with aggregated and anonymous data from other Stanford patients on the Google platform.

Google Cloud analysis will point to gene variants likely to cause a patient’s condition, and a data curation team will help physicians narrow the possibilities.

As both organizations will be HIPAA-covered entities, patient information will be encrypted, both in transit and on servers, and stored in the United States.

Stanford researchers also have ideas for using Google Cloud beyond sequencing, including using machine learning to train computers to read pathology or X-ray images. It also has years of anonymized patient data that could be used to create better algorithms to detect false alerts and relieve alarm fatigue.

To learn more:
- read the Stanford announcement
- here’s the Google blog post