NIH Awards Palantir Technologies with $7 Million Contract for Research Data Simplifying Platform

This past Friday, Palantir Technologies was awarded a $7 million, three-year contract by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Founded by Peter Thiel, the West Coast data analytics company will be using their software platform to gather research data from both private and public sources into one interface, with the ultimate goal being to streamline data analyses.

Palantir specializes in creating data platforms for organizations dealing with extremely complex and sensitive data. They have worked with companies in the past perform tasks such as enhancing car and plane safety, pharmaceutical research, and even terrorism defense. The company is based in Palo Alto and has smaller offices in New York, Washington D.C., and even overseas in London and Paris.

Specifically, Palantir will be using its technology as a collective platform for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and its similar organizations. NCATS is one of the NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers, and functions to speed new medication and medical technology distribution by better dispersing research data. By integrating Palantir’s software, NCATS teams will be able to advance their translational research.

With NCATS’ research data deriving from multiple sources and formats, Palantir’s head of biomedical R&D, Andrew Girvin, claims that their company’s systems will assist NCATS researchers with comprehension of data that was once fragmented. The signing of this contract not only marks a huge advancement for the NIH, but a government sponsorship for the innovative tech firm as well.

“NCATS’ mission is to get more treatments to patients more quickly,” said Girvin. “By bringing together disparate data into one interface, researchers will soon benefit from greater insights in a fraction of the time. Ultimately, the goal is to help accelerate the discovery of new therapies for cancer and other illnesses.”

Girvin also claimed that this contract follows up Palantir’s previous healthcare work with several cancer centers, drug discovery organizations, and the FDA. “In healthcare, the data just happens to be different from the other verticals,” he said. “We’re looking at data from next-generation sequencing, proteomics from mass [spectrometry] instruments, epigenomics, high-throughput drug screening, and then we’re looking at each of these sources in the public and private domain, bringing them together to ultimately help people answer questions of a couple flavors, one of which has to do with precision medicine.”

We’re deploying our software to help @ncats_nih_gov “accelerate the discovery of new therapies for cancer and other illnesses.” Read more: https://t.co/kyJXHEaAXt

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) September 24, 2018

Sources: AP News, MobiHealthNews