Microsoft Signs a Strategic Partnership With Google’s Verily

Microsoft has announced its new strategic partnership with the Alphabet company Verily and with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute. This strategic partnership will help to considerably accelerate advances in biomedicine through the groundbreaking Terra platform. Terra is an open-source platform that’s popularly utilized on Google’s cloud infrastructure.

With this open-source platform, researchers can analyze data in scientific research projects. This new partnership will make full use of Microsoft Azure cloud, AI, and data technologies. The objective is to advance Terra’s platform, as well as increase accessibility to Microsoft’s 168,000 health and life science business partners.

Although more and more biomedical information is being generated and digitized from electronic health records, medical imaging, and other sources, the challenges that exist are complex. This partnership aims to address some of the complexities and challenges being experienced by expanding on Terra’s existing open-source foundation. The plan is to improve collaborations between researchers, clinicians, scientists, and any other parties that may be interested.

This partnership will change the industry for the better, thus impacting patients’ lives positively. This isn’t the first time that Broad Institute has entered into such a strategic partnership with global tech companies with the mission to advance biomedical research. Case in point, the institute has already partnered up with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and more to supply its Genome Analysis Toolkit.

Biomedical research has never been more important than it is now. The future of biomedical research will be shaped by such strategic partnerships, as well as the development of new equipment and facilities. Researchers are also in dire need of money that will fund the research.

Advancements in biomedical research are critical in today’s society as they lead to strategies and techniques that prevent and cure diseases. Thus, continued biomedical research is required not only to improve our healthcare systems but also to make it a lot less costly.

Technology is changing the way we research

Technology is accelerating biomedical research at dizzying speeds. Indeed, we are living in an age of unprecedented scientific opportunity. As a result, many fields of biomedical research are now being driven by technological advancements. There are no two ways about it- technology and advanced research go hand in hand.

The digital revolution in research, whether scientific or academic, is at full speed and it is impacting everything, mostly for the better. Technology has helped to considerably streamline the painstaking process of data analysis. Adding technology to research processes has helped to greatly reduce the potential for errors and improved the speed of the overall research process.

Today, cloud-based software providers stand out in the sector and they are helping researchers gather data in the most efficient of ways. This explains why tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and IBM are increasingly pushing for advancements such as deep learning algorithms and big data analytics. Various platforms are rising to help academic and scientific researchers and scientists from across the universe to collaborate and even collate their findings.

The changing nature of biomedical research

The biomedical science sector has never been more exciting and full of opportunity than it is today. From basic research to health services and clinical research, the opportunities available have grown and will keep growing in the future as long as technology continues to advance. Because everything has become so advanced in the past several decades, we now find ourselves in a new frontier of unprecedented opportunity.

As a result, the way large and small biological and biomedical research firms operate has changed considerably. Even though conventionally structured lab and clinical trials and investigations still maintain their basic components, various technical and scientific advancements have changed how biomedical research is carried out.

For instance, high throughput technologies are now allowing the rapid accumulation of unparalleled amounts of biological and health-related sets of data. Protein and nucleic acid databases are totally changing the way the structure and function of biomolecules are studies. Now more than ever, researchers are relying on biological repositories and databases to investigate and collect vast amounts of research data.

Thus far, the biggest and most noteworthy large-scale research project in the field of biology has been the Human Genome Project. The genome project is an international project that was created to map and sequence the human genome. When the idea of the Genome Project was first proposed, a lot of researchers were against it owing to the sheer volume and cost of the project.

Even though a lot of people claimed that it was infeasible to carry out a research project of such magnitude, a draft sequence of the entire human genome was completed in 2000. The full sequence was later completed in April 2003. The data that was generated from this project will aid biomedical research years into the future.

Due to the human genome project and similar projects that have been carried out in the recent past, biologists and researchers now need better data management than ever before. Technological advancements like automation are allowing researchers to organize data in more efficient and meaningful ways that are making sequencing faster.

The amount of data that’s being generated by research projects is also fostering partnerships and collaborations between various fields in chemistry, medicine, computer science, mathematics, and physics. This means that as more collaborative clinic trials take place, the need for interoperability of clinical databases will rise significantly.

Final thoughts

The field of biomedical research is advancing at alarming rates. With these recent advancements comes the need for enhanced approaches as it relates to research and innovation. Strategic partnerships such as Google and Microsoft will only impact the industry for the better.

In the future, the interplay that currently exists between biomedical research and technology will ensure continuous growth at all levels. As new and improved technologies allow researchers to deal with different and increased varieties of data, more knowledge will be unearthed. That means that the biomedical sector must do whatever it takes to develop and adopt systems that will allow easy computational analyses of complex data.