Research

At Stanford University, we have already started to develop the technologies of precision health. These include: (1) smart toilets with nanosensors that constantly sample your stool and urine. (2) a smart bra that constantly images breast tissue through photoacoustic principles to detect the earliest possible changes. (3) a magnetic needle that safely resides within your bloodstream to sample the potential presence of rare molecules being shed from diseased cells. (4) new microscopes can image single cells in your body without removing tissue from your body. (5) new clinical longitudinal studies to sample molecules from humans over long periods of time in order to define the meaning of human health. (6) strategies to sample small molecules in your breath looking for the earliest signs of disease. Several of these multi-departmental research efforts at Stanford have been funded by the NIH and industry.

Project Baseline

Project Baseline is the quest to collect comprehensive health data and use it as a map and compass, pointing the way to disease prevention. A joint effort between Stanford Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, and Verily will enroll 10,000 participants over the next few years.

Autism Resources

GapMap has one of the most comprehensive autism resource databases in the US with over 30,000 autism resources. Additional autism resources include the gut microbiome in autism and the autism Glass Project.

Pervasive Wellbeing Technology

The Pervasive Wellbeing Technology lab combines medicine, design, and engineering principles to keep people healthy, sleeping well and performing at their best. The lab is creating individualized and adaptive behavior change technology interventions seamlessly embedded in daily life routines. In short, the goal is to find people whether they are, sleeping, sitting, commuting, talking, writing, etc. and deliver value while minimizing barriers for adoption.

UK Longevity Explorer

The UbbLE web site was created as part of a research project using data from the UK Biobank: a large-scale national health resource which aims to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of many serious diseases. Between 2006 and 2010, the UK Biobank team collected a large number of measurements (variables) from over half a million UK volunteers aged 40-70. These measurements included taking blood samples, physical and biological measurements from volunteers as well as carrying out detailed questionnaires. The large-scale nature of UK Biobank makes it a unique and valuable data resource, which is available to researchers worldwide after an approved application. Findings were carried out by Andrew Ganna (Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University) and Erik Ingelsson (Stanford University and Uppsala University).

Global Biobank Engine

The Global Biobank Engine presents case-control association results from the UK Biobank hospital in-patient health-related outcomes summary information data (Data-Field 41202); computational grouping of phenotypes with cancer (Category 100092) registry, death registry data (Category 100093), algorithmically-defined outcomes (Category 42), and verbal questionnaire data (Category 100071); and manually curated grouping of phenotypes. We also include the MRP inference, a Bayesian framework to perform aggregate analysis of variants, genes, and multiple phenotypes.