Mayo Clinic, nference Accelerate Biomedical Discovery Through Data-Derived Insights

ROCHESTER, Minn. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Mayo Clinic and nference today announced advancements in harnessing biomedical data. These advancements will accelerate innovative scientific and clinical research to improve patient care. Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research and providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. nference is transforming healthcare by making biomedical knowledge computable.

The central accomplishment in these advancements is the Clinical Data Analytics Platform. This is a key venture within the Mayo Clinic Platform, which is the strategic initiative to improve health care through data-derived insights and knowledge.

In just one year, Mayo’s collaboration with nference produced the secure and privacy-protecting Clinical Data Analytics Platform. This platform deidentifies and synthesizes billions of relevant pieces of biomedical knowledge, including clinical data, laboratory reports, ECGs and physician notes. The unprecedented combination of structured and unstructured data, including clinical notes and images, has until now been inaccessible in a computable format for analysis and use by scientists and clinicians, and represents the collective experience of millions of patients and the wisdom of thousands of physicians.

The Clinical Data Analytics Platform features best-in-class nference deidentification technology, augmented curation of unstructured and structured data and a novel federated search model, allowing researchers to derive meaningful scientific and clinical insights. Data are stored in a secure cloud environment. This innovative platform centers on patient privacy, while opening promising new avenues for research and development into therapeutics, early diagnosis and clinical care.

“Our commitment to improving patient lives is always front and center,” says John Halamka, MD, president, Mayo Clinic Platform. “In developing the Clinical Data Analytics Platform with nference, we established a secure, privacy-protecting environment that accelerates research and development of diagnostics, therapeutics and cures to improve patient care.”

“nference, a science-first software company, was founded to improve patient outcomes by unlocking insights in biomedical data while protecting individual patient privacy,” says Murali Aravamudan, co-founder and CEO of nference. “We have built a software platform that brings vast, curated quantities of scientific and biological knowledge ― previously siloed and inaccessible ― to researchers’ and clinicians’ fingertips so they can, for the first time, draw on the collective wisdom and experience of millions of scientists, physicians and patients.”

Over the past year, the collaboration between Mayo Clinic and nference has accelerated life sciences research, development and clinical care in significant ways including biomarker discovery and validation, real-world evidence generation and early disease detection.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayo Clinic and nference researchers demonstrated the power and utility of their sophisticated analytics to advance understanding of COVID-19, contributing to the body of medical knowledge in molecular, epidemiological and clinical research, including:

• Understanding of COVID-19
• Long-term complications following COVID-19 infection
• The protective effect of other immunizations
• Relationships between preexisting conditions and complications from COVID-19

Thirteen studies coauthored by researchers from Mayo Clinic and nference document this important work.

In 2021, Mayo and nference anticipate expanding the collaboration to include advances in ECG diagnostics and digital pathology.

About the Mayo Clinic Platform

The Mayo Clinic Platform is a coordinated portfolio approach to create platform ventures and leverage emerging technologies, including AI, connected health care devices and natural language processing. The Mayo Clinic Platform design includes an ecosystem of partners that complement Mayo clinical capabilities and provide access to scalable solutions. Mayo Clinic has invested in nference as a strategic partner, and nference has helped develop core components of the Mayo Clinic Platform.

About Mayo Clinic’s Clinical Data Analytics Platform 

The Clinical Data Analytics Platform applies advanced data analytics on deidentified data from Mayo Clinic and other organizations, as well as the vast information in scientific literature to advance medicine and improve the health of patients. This platform is based on a federated architecture, which enables multiple participants to build a common, robust artificial intelligence and machine learning model without sharing datasets, thus addressing critical issues such as data privacy, security and access rights to heterogeneous sources of data. Mayo Clinic selected nference as its first platform partner to accelerate drug discovery and development across the biopharmaceutical ecosystem, including top biopharmaceutical companies, to create cures for patients. Additional partners will be added in other biomedical areas.

About nference nferX® software suite 

The nferX software triangulates insights from public and proprietary datasets, curating structured and unstructured data to enable researchers to address rapidly and effectively significant challenges in drug discovery. Unstructured data, rich in biological context, carries the promise of meaningful insights that translate into life-changing diagnosis, care and therapeutics.

About nference deidentification technology

The nference neural network-based deidentification software used in the Mayo Clinic Data Analytics Platform meets Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act mandates to protect patient privacy through independent expert assessment and certification of its methodology and outcomes. This opens opportunities for machine-assisted curation of data that produce insights into the natural history of diseases, quality of life metrics and diagnostic and therapeutic outcomes. Automated deidentification and augmented curation technologies developed by nference leverage today’s deep-learning renaissance. Significant, meaningful data are now computable and accessible to solve complex real-world problems, improving patient lives on a global scale.

About federated architecture

nference federated architecture, which is scalable and structured to encourage and facilitate collaboration among health care systems and biopharmaceutical researchers, maintains data security and confidentiality of individual collaborations. Deidentified data resides and is securely stored in a cloud environment. Scientists and clinicians derive meaningful insights from proprietary longitudinal clinical datasets, transforming discovery and accelerating development while preserving patient privacy.

About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and to providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for Mayo Clinic News and An Inside Look at Mayo Clinic for further information.

About nference

Through its powerful augmented intelligence software nferX^®, nference is transforming health care by making biomedical knowledge computable. Its partnership with Mayo Clinic has given nference an opportunity to synthesize more than 100 years of institutional knowledge, producing real-world evidence in real time by converting large amounts of data into deep insights to advance discovery and development of diagnostics and therapeutics. nference is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Follow nference on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit us at nference.ai. 

Contacts:

Dusanka Anastasijevic
Media inquiries for Mayo Clinic
507-284-5005
newsbureau@mayo.edu

Anita Kawatra
Media and investor inquiries for nference
media@nference.net

Christy Maginn 
Media inquiries for nference 
703-297-7194
Christina.Maginn@Havas.com

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SOURCE nference