Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet company, launched the first step of Project Baseline, an effort to develop a dataset and broad picture of "baseline" population health.
In partnership with Durham, N.C.-based Duke University School of Medicine and Stanford (Calif.) Medicine, Verily will recruit roughly 10,000 participants for the longitudinal study. Over the course of at least four years, investigators will gather health data from these participants through clinical visits, wearable sensors and self-reported surveys, among other sources.
The Project Baseline data repository of clinical, behavioral, genetic, environmental, imaging and molecular measurements will be hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. The project's initial research goals include characterizing physical and biochemical traits and and identifying biomarkers of disease-related transitions.
"With recent advances at the intersection of science and technology, we have the opportunity to characterize human health with unprecedented depth and precision," said Jessica Mega, MD, chief medical officer of Verily. "The Project Baseline study is the first step on our journey to comprehensively map human health."
In the future, Verily will test and develop new solutions to access and organize health information through Project Baseline. A subset of qualified researchers will also gain access to the deidentified data for future exploratory analysis.