“The National Institutes of Health is looking to build largest centralized collection of COVID-19 patient data in the world.”
“In pursuit of that, NIH awarded Palantir Technologies a noncompetitive $36 million contract for a data enclave over the weekend.”
“Sought by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), the secure network for storing and sharing scientific data manages public and private researchers’ access to clinical, laboratory and diagnostic information from healthcare institutions.”
“With that, Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) grantees and National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) researchers are able to understand COVID-19 data and the disease faster with the enclave streamlining data access.”
“’The contractor will continue to work closely with N3C researchers to collaboratively scope and configure additional research workflows within the UNITE N3C Platform,’ reads the solicitation awarded Saturday. ‘By integrating data from multiple sites, the platform will enable researchers to explore questions with vastly more statistical power than is achievable at individual CTSA sites, which is essential for better understanding this highly heterogeneous disease.’”
“NIH calls the enclave the NCATS Secure Scientific Platforms Environment, and it supports the Unified NIH Integrated Translational Environment (UNITE), which hosts the N3C data platform proof-of-concept built by Palantir in May. The noncompetitive solicitation states there were ‘no other sources capable of providing this government requirement…’” Read the full article here.
Source: NIH expanding enclave for COVID-19 data with $36M Palantir contract – By Dave Nyczepir, September 29, 2020. FedScoop.
