Intel, Google Cloud Participate in NIH Research Program to Help Improve Population Health

Intel and Google’s cloud computing arm have joined a National Institutes of Health program that seeks to provide COVID-19 researchers access to biomedical data from underrepresented groups as part of efforts to improve population health.

The NIH All of Us Research Program will make biomedical information available to researchers through the Researcher Workbench platform, which is powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors and hosted on Google Cloud, Intel said Tuesday.

Through the program, Intel is supporting research projects and data curation initiatives by funding compute credits to help accelerate the discovery and treatment of the coronavirus.

“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.” 

The All of Us program has collected data from more than 1.34 million surveys and over 233,000 electronic health records to date. It has also secured more than 279,000 biosamples for genomic sequencing efforts and attracted more than 366,000 participants.

“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,” said Chris Lunt, chief technology officer of the NIH All of Us Research Program.