Data Science Transforming Biomedical Research at Feinberg

• 8.4 million patient records allow scientists to develop precision medicine
• “No other institution is approaching big data as holistically as we are”
• Scientists analyze genetic information to develop more personalized, effective treatments

Data Science is transforming biomedical research at the Feinberg School of Medicine, propelling important discoveries in rare and common diseases and beginning to translate those findings into new treatments and individualized patient care at an accelerated pace.

Findings gleaned from deep dives into data are already informing research in such fields as cardiovascular disease, cancer and care for critically ill children at Northwestern. To support the burgeoning data science field, Feinberg is recruiting faculty, creating a major new center, training graduate students and connecting scientists to each other’s data.

Data science storage

Much of the research is possible because of the oceanic depth of research and clinical data housed in Northwestern Medicine’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (NMEDW) — one of the leading and most mature depositories in the country with 8.4 million unique patient records. That includes 95 million inpatient admissions and outpatient visits and 101 billion data elements (a patient lab test, for example) -- a number updated by 14 million new data elements every night.   

“The depth of the data on those individuals now allows us to drill down in a way that’s never been possible before and really understand individual responses to treatments,” says Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of preventive medicine and director of Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. “It’s allowing us to develop true precision medicine so we can better tailor treatments to the people who are most likely to respond and least likely to have adverse effects. That’s the end game of this. That’s the future of medicine.” 

Researchers’ use of the Enterprise Data Warehouse has soared 250 percent since 2011, supporting 858 research projects in the last four years.

Feinberg’s ‘holistic approach’ to data science

As data science in biomedical research begins to explode, Feinberg is investing heavily to position itself as a leader in the nascent field. It has recruited 20 new faculty members, created the new Center for Data Science and Informatics (CDSI), established data science classes for all graduate students and is developing the equivalent of match.com for scientists to connect them to each others' research data. 

In addition, Feinberg recently netted a prestigious $1.25 million, five-year National Institutes of Health grant to train “the next generation of tool builders” to answer critical questions in data science better and faster. The Biomedical Data Driven Discovery Training Program will recruit three new students a year (and support each for two years) from Feinberg and the McCormick School of Engineering.

“I don’t know of any other institution that is approaching big data as holistically as we are,” says Justin Starren, the director of CDSI. “We are treating this as a fundamental skill that should be part of the general education of a biomedical graduate student.     

“Increasingly, biology is transitioning from a small team, small data world to a big team, big data world,” Starren says. “The way you approach a problem when you think about it as a big data problem is different. Training graduate students today in biomedicine without giving them exposure to data science would be equivalent to not giving them exposure to statistics.”