UPDATED 14:30 EDT / JUNE 30 2021

CLOUD

NIH teams up with Palantir to build large database for COVID-19 research

When the National Institutes of Health set out to build the largest centralized collection of COVID-19 patient data in the world, it turned to Palantir Technologies Inc. to make it happen. The result was a data enclave so that researchers with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, or N3C, were better able to understand COVID data and disease more rapidly.

Palantir’s collaborative effort with NIH also earned it recognition as part of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for “Best COVID-19 Solution.”

“Rather than saying you have to provide the data in a certain format or standard, N3C was able to say: ‘Just give us the data how you have it, in whatever format is easiest for you,’” said Ben Amor (pictured, left), healthcare and life sciences lead at Palantir. “We will take care of that process of transforming it into a single standard data model, converting all of the medical vocabularies, doing all of the data quality assessment that’s needed to ensure the data is ready for research. That was very much a collaborative endeavor.”

Amor spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. He was joined by Sam Michael (pictured, right), chief information officer of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, part of the NIH, and they discussed benefits gained by researchers from the project, how Palantir’s technology supported the initiative, and the importance of maintaining ties to the open-source community. (* Disclosure below.)

Seven billion data rows

More than 200 research projects are currently underway using the enclave repository, which now contains information on more than 2 million COVID positive patients and over 7 billion rows of data. The integration of a vast amount of information from multiple sites allows researchers to get questions answered using significantly more statistical power.

“There’s multiple formats for electronic health records; there’s different standards, different versions,” Michael explained. “How do we have all of this data harmonized into something which is usable again for research? If we want to build an environment that’s collaborative for researchers around the country, around the world, the natural place to do that is with a cloud-first strategy.”

Part of that strategy involves using Palantir Foundry, a platform that eliminates barriers between front-end analysis of data and the backend management of it. Users can source and transform data into any desired shape and take action accordingly.

“We were able to provide the technical infrastructure for taking the transformation pipelines that were being developed, the logic and code, and develop these robust, centralized templates for that,” Amor said. “There’s more than three and a half billion lab records in this database now. If you were trying to do this manually, it would take you thousands of years; it just wouldn’t be possible.”

The NCATS project is not just an example of a public/private collaboration, but it demonstrates the power of open source as well.

“Open source is an incredibly important piece of this,” Michael said. “All the harmonization work, all of that effort, this massive complex extract, transform and load process is in the N3C GitHub. What we’re building are sustainable platforms that will actually grow and evolve based upon the research needs over time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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