MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded and chaired by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, launched the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic). This is the fourth major collaborative effort between MIT and Community Jameel.

J-Clinic, a key part of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, will focus on developing machine lear ning technologies to revolutionize the prevention, detection, and treatment of disease. It will concentrate on creating and commercializing high-precision, afford able, and scalable machine learning technologies in areas of health care ranging from diagnostics to pharmaceuticals, with three main areas of focus:

• Preventative medicine methods and technologies with the potential to change the course of non-infectious disease by stopping it in its tracks.
• Cost-effective diagnostic tests that may be able to both detect and alleviate health problems.
• Drug discovery and development to enable faster and cheaper discover y, development, and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals, particularly those targeted for individually customized therapies.
• J-Clinic’s holistic approach will utilize MIT’s strong expertise in cellular and medical biology, computer science, engineering, and the social sciences, amongst other areas.

“The health care system has no shortage of data,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif, “But it has far too little access to the kinds of tools and experts who can translate population-level data into clinical insights that could make it possible to tune care precisely for individuals. Building on MIT’s deep expertise in fields from cancer to neuroscience, and our longstanding connections to Boston’s world-class medical community, J-Clinic offers an accelerated path to creating new technologies that could help make health care more effective everywhere—from villages in developing nations to major teaching hospitals.”

J-Clinic will leverage MIT’s strong relationship with industry and Boston-area hospitals to test, integrate, and deploy new technologies. It will also seek to advance patentable research that could be commercialized and spun-out through licensing to startups and pharmaceutical companies putting these advances into real-life practice.

“The J-Clinic will positively impact the world by accelerating the creation of machine learning technologies and algorithms that will make preventing, detecting, and treating disease more precise, affordable, and personalized,” added Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who will serve as J-Clinic’s chair.

As part of its work, J-Clinic will support research projects, education, workshops, and other activities at the intersection of machine learning and biology. This marriage of machine learning with clinical and biological insights aspires to spur a global transformation in the health care and medical fields with the aim to save the lives of millions of people, spawn new technologies, and improve the entire health care industry around the globe.