A new partnership between Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will apply rigorous data analysis and systems engineering practices toward revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

The partnership will leverage the medical and systems engineering expertise at the two institutions to create a “learning health system” that will speed the translation of knowledge to practice in a number of areas, such as heart failure and genetics.

“For 125 years, Johns Hopkins has focused on the idea that even when you put a disease  under one diagnostic label, patients are quite heterogeneous even within that group,” says Antony Rosen, vice dean for research for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Many diseases can be broken down into subgroups based on patients’ symptoms or how their conditions evolved, he says. “What we aim to do is to bring novel diagnostic tools of the era to bear on defining subgroups of patients, understanding the mechanisms that drive disease and devising more targeted, homogeneous treatment interventions.”

The initiative is made possible because of advances in technology, Rosen says, including more powerful and faster computers. In addition, diagnostic equipment has vastly improved. “You used to be able to study a really limited amount of data. Now, instead of measuring two, three or five analytes (chemical components) at a time, you can really measure hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of analytes at a time, and you just need a tiny amount of human material, such as a blood or saliva sample.”

There are numerous sources of data today available for study, he explains, from electronic health records and patient biochemical or genetic measures to wearable devices. “A critical part of doing precision medicine well is having a place where data from various sources can be safely stored, ingested, and be available for analysis and discovery.” The institutions are putting the finishing touches on a data platform that will enable such investigations.

Johns Hopkins inHealth, the precision medicine effort at Johns Hopkins, aims to launch a number of precision medicine centers of excellence to highlight areas where these efforts can be applied to greatly improve patient care. The first two, to start this fiscal year, will focus on multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer, Rosen says.