Stanford-AstraZeneca collaboration funds two new projects

A collaboration between Stanford Department of Medicine and AstraZeneca is distributing its second round of grants to two innovative research projects.

Two research projects have been selected for one-year funding by the Stanford Center for Clinical Research and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

This is the second year of a three-year collaboration between the organizations. The focus of the collaboration is cardio-metabolic and respiratory diseases, oncology, mobile health, innovations in clinical trial design and operations, and education and training initiatives. 

The 2017-18 grantees and their projects are:

  • Daniel Rubin, MD, MS, associate professor of biomedical data science, of radiology and of medicine, who is using electronic health records from multiple institutions to build statistical models that will relate patient treatments to outcomes. Focusing on metastatic breast cancer, he will compute predictive statistical models to identify best treatments, such as the decision about when to switch from endocrine therapy to chemotherapy, which chemotherapy drug to administer and when to stop one treatment or start another. Ultimately, he hopes to expand this infrastructure to develop decision models for a variety of diseases.
  • Tina Hernandez-Boussard, PhD, associate professor of medicine, of surgery and of biomedical data science, who proposes building a tool that will automate the manual and extremely labor-intensive staging of prostate cancer using both clinical and pathological data captured in the electric health record. She hopes such automated staging will improve care coordination, physician workload, hospital certification and national cancer surveillance efforts.
     

The Stanford-Astra-Zeneca collaboration is distributing $2 million over three years to support six innovative research projects by Stanford investigators. The projects each receive $260,000.

About Stanford Medicine

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2023 ISSUE 3

Exploring ways AI is applied to health care