Microsoft, Alphabet's Verily partner to accelerate new innovations in biomedicine

The new collaboration will leverage the Terra platform, a secure, scalable, open-source platform for biomedical researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate, to accelerate the development of global biomedical research, provide greater access and empower the open-source community.

Microsoft on Monday announced a multi-year partnership with Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. focused on life sciences and healthcare, and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to bring together advanced technologies, industry expertise, and scale to address some of the most complex and widespread diseases facing the global society today.

The new collaboration will leverage the Terra platform, a secure, scalable, open-source platform for biomedical researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate, to accelerate the development of global biomedical research, provide greater access and empower the open-source community.

"The opportunity to partner with the Broad Institute and Verily in helping researchers around the world understand and treat our toughest human diseases is an honor. Through this partnership, we will apply the power of Microsoft Azure and its enterprise-grade capabilities in security and privacy, along with cutting-edge data and AI solutions like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, to deliver on the vision of the Terra platform at a new level of scale," said Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., corporate vice president of Microsoft Health Next.

The Broad-Verily-Microsoft partnership will accelerate Terra's vision for health and life sciences research by:

• Expanding on Terra's open, modular and interoperable research platform, with the addition of the Microsoft Azure cloud, data and AI technologies, and global capabilities
• Increasing Terra's accessibility to the more than 168,000 health and life sciences organizations partnering with Microsoft around the world
• Enabling secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores via collaborative workspaces
• Allowing access to a rapidly growing portfolio of open and proprietary standards-based tools, best practices workflows and APIs
• Enabling federated data analysis to uncover insights and build novel analytical and predictive models while ensuring patient privacy
• Creating a seamless and secure flow to speed the delivery of data and insights between research and clinical domains
• Using open APIs and modular components to advance the standards-based biomedical data ecosystem in line with the open, compatible and secure approach to data developed by the Data Biosphere and the responsible policies and technical standards established by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

In a separate release, Terra said that Microsoft will dedicate software engineering resources to further developing Terra, lend their machine learning expertise to scientific advancements through Terra and help drive adoption in the clinical sphere.

Further, with this multi-year partnership, the Terra platform will support both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, allowing more researchers and their respective organizations to make use of the platform.