Intel, Google Donate Compute Credits, Cloud Space To All Of Us Program

February 2, 2021

By Bio-IT World Staff

February 2, 2021 | Intel and Google announced today that they have joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us Research Program in its historic effort to improve population health by making biomedical data from underrepresented groups available to COVID-19 researchers nationwide via the Researcher Workbench. 

To date, the program has enrolled more than 366,000 participants and received more than 279,000 biosamples for genomic sequencing, as well as amassed data from more than 233,000 electronic health records (EHRs) and more than 1.34 million completed surveys.

To speed COVID-19 research, All of Us is prioritizing performing assays of serum collected between January 2020 and March 2020 to detect antibodies; collecting electronic health data from participants, including those who have tested or are presumed positive for COVID-19; and collecting data from recurring surveys about participants’ experiences during the pandemic.

The All of Us Research program’s Researcher Workbench data repository will help researchers access those data to learn more about the impact of individual differences in lifestyle, socioeconomic, environment and biologic characteristics in order to advance precision diagnosis, prevention and treatment. The Researcher Workbench is hosted on Google Cloud and powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

As part by Intel’s Pandemic Response Technology Initiative, Intel is funding compute credits to support data curation and research projects to speed COVID-19 discovery and treatment.

“All of Us is dedicated to serving a diverse body of researchers who can come together to tackle our most pressing health challenges,” said Chris Lunt, the chief technology officer of the NIH All of Us Research Program. “We appreciate Intel’s contribution of research credits and Google Cloud’s computing power to enable novel analysis of our dataset to drive greater understanding of COVID-19.”

“We are excited to join Google and All of Us in offering compute for analyzing the most diverse health database in the world,” said Prashant Shah, global head of artificial intelligence for Health and Life Sciences at Intel. “The collection and availability of this data is essential to speed scientific research and discovery to not only fight COVID-19, but to also address health disparities in medical research for years to come.”