The Biden-Harris Administration will award $49 million to the Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub, a consortium that will drive the development of a precision medicine-based biotech ecosystem in the region.
The funding, provided by the Biden-Harris Administration through the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration, will support five new projects aimed at building a comprehensive data ecosystem to foster technology development while prioritizing responsible patient data use, deploying a mobile fleet to provide medical referrals and cancer screening in communities facing health disparities, utilizing AI and advanced data approaches to streamline clinical integration of emerging technologies, developing a comprehensive talent pipeline to support biotech innovation, and aligning coordination efforts across the hub to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing.
The Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub aims to position the state as a global leader in precision medicine as part of the first phase of the National Tech Hub Program, which has established 31 designated tech hubs across the country to advance U.S. leadership in key industries and technologies, including quantum information technology and biomanufacturing.
The $49 million is expected to be finalized in the coming months as part of a larger second phase funding round.
Consortium leaders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimate that the five projects in Phase 2 will directly create about 30,000 jobs and indirectly generate another 111,000 jobs.
One of these projects will support the development of the Wisconsin Health Data Hub, a data ecosystem designed to provide researchers with a wide range of health information for use in treatment discovery and effectiveness studies.
“The Wisconsin Health Data Hub will enable researchers to mine vast resources to identify new biomarkers, pinpoint previously unknown risk factors for a range of diseases and help prototype new treatments,” said Dr. Jomol Mathew, the project's principal investigator and the school's associate dean for informatics and information technology, in a press release. “By harnessing the power of real-world health data and advanced analytics provided by the Wisconsin Health Data Hub, researchers will be limited only by their ingenuity in terms of the questions they can ask to improve health.”
The Health Data Hub will also be used to power two additional Phase 2 projects: the CareScan mobile cancer screening initiative and a GE HealthCare-led effort to streamline technology integration within the health system to advance theranostics, a precision medicine approach that combines diagnostics and therapy to treat advanced cancers.
“The flow of data between these three projects will provide unprecedented guidance to accelerate discoveries and translate discoveries into treatments that benefit patients,” said Anjon Audhya, PhD, senior associate dean for basic research, biotechnology and graduate studies in the School of Medicine and Public Health.
Shania Kennedy has been covering healthcare IT and analytics related news since 2022.
