Newswise — MEMPHIS, TN — February 13, 2019 — St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital today announced it has been named a recipient of Microsoft Corp.’s 2019 Health Innovation Awards.
The awards, which were announced at the 2019 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Florida, recognize health organizations and their technology solution partners for using Microsoft’s intelligent health technologies in innovative ways that help, empower care teams, improve clinical and operational outcomes, and advance precision health care. The 2019 winners are influencing the industry by creating breakthrough solutions that empower health and life sciences organizations, while meeting global, local and industry-specific compliance and security standards.
St. Jude Cloud, which was developed as a partnership between St. Jude, DNAnexus and Microsoft, is a secure, cloud-based data-sharing and collaboration environment providing researchers access to an extensive public repository of pediatric cancer genomics data, accelerated data mining, analysis and visualization capabilities. It provides genomic sequencing data to the global research community and makes complex computational analysis pipelines easily accessible. The availability of this data will lead to progress in eradicating childhood cancer.
St. Jude Cloud allows scientists to explore more than 5,000 whole-genome, whole-exome and 1,200 RNA-Seq datasets from more than 5,000 pediatric cancer patients and survivors. St. Jude continues to add more whole genome sequences and expects to make 10,000 of those sequences available on the cloud.
“We have gotten off to a strong start and are seeing promising responses among our peer institutions who have accessed St. Jude Cloud,” said Keith Perry, senior vice president and chief information officer at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “We will keep building upon this foundation and continue to use this technology to support the St. Jude mission of advancing cures for pediatric life-threatening diseases.”
Since its launch in April 2018 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, more than 800 people from 400 institutions have registered with St. Jude Cloud. Researchers are able to receive immediate access to data that previously could take weeks to download in a matter of minutes.
“The health industry is undergoing a Digital Transformation in which intelligent health technologies are helping communities and individuals improve care by helping them better understand and share information,” said Chris Sakalosky, vice president, U.S. Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft. “This year’s Microsoft Health Innovation Award recipients are advancing the goals of improved patient engagement and care coordination through their pioneering use of Microsoft cloud and AI services.”
Nominations were submitted by health providers, payers, pharmaceutical and life science organizations, and public and private health institutions across the world for applying Microsoft technology to create transformative and highly effective innovations. An esteemed panel of industry experts selected this year’s winners based on how their innovation represents a forward-thinking development or implementation of a solution that is delivering groundbreaking results and producing better health outcomes for more people. Recipients will be highlighted on the Microsoft “In Health” blog at www.Microsoft.com/Health
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is leading the way the world understands, treats and cures childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. It is the only national Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. Treatments developed at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to 80 percent since the hospital opened more than 50 years ago. St. Jude freely shares the breakthroughs it makes, and every child saved at St. Jude means doctors and scientists worldwide can use that knowledge to save thousands more children. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing and food — because all a family should worry about is helping their child live. To learn more, visit st.jude.org or follow St. Jude on social media at @stjuderesearch.
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