Impact
Collaborating for real-world impact
Solving grand health challenges relies on end-to-end collaboration. Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance research collaborations have led to several innovations that are used in the clinic today.
“Finding a true collaborator like this is a very rare thing. This isn’t about a transactional experience but both teams coming together to help solve problems that make a real difference for Mayo Clinic research and practice initiatives.”
Mat Wiepert
Section Head, Information Technology, Instructor in Biomedical Informatics, Mayo Clinic
Computational Genomics Pipeline
The process used to understand mutations and find genetic markers for disease takes considerable computational time, storage, and power. Together, Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance teams have reduced analysis time by 97%, from 20 days to about half a day. This improves patient care by significantly reducing the amount of time patients wait for important results and increasing the number of patients that can be served.
Genomix for Clinical Practice
Mayo Clinic and Illinois have collaborated on technology that provides a single interface to view all of a patient’s genetic test results. This platform, currently integrated into Mayo Clinic’s electronic health record system, emphasizes the most important genetic information and connects the dots among discrete results, allowing clinicians of differing specialties to gain a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s genetic profile.
Genomic Coverage Visualization Tool
Coverage Utilities is a specialized tool for evaluating the depth of sequence coverage in regions of interest from the results of a single sample genome sequencing test. This tool is used in Mayo Clinic’s workflow for clinical interpretation of genetic test results, providing a complex yet intuitive visual interface where users can efficiently review coverage data and flag low coverage areas for follow-up.
Omics Data Platform
Mayo Clinic’s digital omics platform centralizes all Mayo patient omics data into a single, organized and efficient repository to stimulate opportunities for improving patient care and treatment. By combining expertise, Mayo Clinic and Illinois are creating cloud services, interfaces and workflows needed to facilitate the flow of genetic information from lab to clinician.
Major Depressive Disorder: ALMOND
An artificial intelligence (AI) system is helping Mayo Clinic researchers and clinicians identify effective personalized treatments for people diagnosed with major depressive disorder, a leading cause of medical disability worldwide. This unique new approach, called the Analytics and Machine Learning Framework for Omics and Clinical Big Data (ALMOND) Study, uses an AI algorithm to discover patterns and unique characteristics in participants' genomic data and health histories. In a preliminary study, the ALMOND algorithm was 75% to 85% accurate in predicting whether common antidepressant drugs would work for specific participants, compared with about 60% accuracy when predictions are based on clinical, demographic, and social factors alone.