Genomic Medicine Sweden launches collaboration with Microsoft in cloud computing, AI and visualisation. The collaboration will enable the vast amount of data generated in precision medicine to be put to the best possible use for patients and research.
“It is and will be a huge challenge for healthcare to manage and compute the data that is generated for precision medicine. And data is the core of precision medicine,” says Per Sikora, Head of Unit at the Bioinformatic Data Center at the University of Gothenburg and co-chair of GMS Informatics.
Over the past years, GMS has established a national IT infrastructure, the National Genomics Platform (NGP), to manage data so that it can provide the best possible benefit for patient diagnosis and treatment and for research. In addition to storing and sharing data, computation and visualisations are critical components to create knowledge from the data. And computation in particular require a lot of computing power.
GMS is now formalising its collaboration with Microsoft by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This lays the foundation for collaboration on specific projects to strengthen and promote precision medicine in Sweden. Areas included are cloud computing, AI and visualization to increase understanding of the data generated in healthcare.
“We are excited to collaborate with a world-leading company like Microsoft to look at new computational solutions. This will allow us to look at data in new ways and thus increase knowledge about the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases,” says Per Sikora.
“Microsoft has extensive experience of working with government and regional stakeholders both in Sweden and internationally. They also have a broad interest in life science and medical research,” Per continues.
“Sweden has an opportunity to become one of the world’s leading regions when it comes to life science thanks to organizations like GMS that innovate and push to boundaries of the industry. Clinical and digital excellence will be intertwined in a world powered by data. We look forward to the collaboration with GMS to ensure that digital excellence can be an acceleration for implementation of precision medicine,” says Thomas Floberg, Marketing and Operations Leader at Microsoft Sweden.
“We now need to plan, develop and scale up to be able to do the types of computation needed in precision medicine in the future. If we have a bottleneck in computing, Sweden will fall behind in both precision medicine and life science research,” says Per Sikora.
Contact:
Per Sikora, per.sikora[at]gu.se
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