NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Weill Cornell Medicine announced today that it has received a $5 million gift to launch a new initiative that will accelerate and expand its use of precision medicine in patient care.
The gift was made by investment firm WorldQuant and its founder Igor Tulchinsky to support the creation of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, which aims to develop and use predictive tools and quantitative methods to better understand the genetic factors that drive disease in individual patients.
Weill Cornell Medicine scientists will collaborate with WorldQuant technologists and researchers to analyze clinical samples and visualize various diseased tissues at single-cell resolution. These methods will be combined with a supercomputing infrastructure that will include new software that applies advanced pattern-recognition algorithms to model disease progression.
The effort will be led by Weill Cornell Medicine's Christopher Mason and Olivier Elemento, and will involve physician-scientists from the Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine and the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. The initiative is also expected to recruit software engineers and artificial intelligence experts.
"There is a great opportunity to leverage the technology and proprietary algorithms we've developed for use outside of the financial markets, particularly around predictive medicine and cancer research," Tulchinsky, who is also a member of the board of overseers at Weill Cornell Medicine, said in a statement. "This initiative has tremendous possibilities, and I am proud to help drive advances in the field."