New J-Clinic to harness machine learning tech

Hassan Jameel, left, president of Community Jameel Saudi Arabia, with MIT President L. Rafael Reif, center, and Fady Jameel, president of Community Jameel International.

MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded and chaired by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel ‘78, launched the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic) on Tuesday. 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 learning technologies to revolutionize the prevention, detection, and treatment of disease. It will concentrate on creating and commercializing high-precision, affordable, and scalable machine learning technologies in areas of health care ranging from diagnostics to pharmaceuticals, with three main areas of focus:
l Preventative medicine methods and technologies with the potential to change the course of non-infectious disease by stopping it in its tracks.
l Cost-effective diagnostic tests that may be able to both detect and alleviate health problems.
l Drug discovery and development to enable faster and cheaper discovery, development, and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals, particularly those targeted for individually customized therapies.
J-Clinic’s holistic approach will utilize MIT’s expertise in cellular and medical biology, computer science, engineering, and the social sciences, among 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.”
“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,” said 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. “It will be a truly multifaceted effort that amplifies synergies between the life sciences and the latest research in human and machine intelligence. J-Clinic will inspire innovation for the betterment of humanity.”
“Channeling MIT’s machine learning expertise into health care will transform medical outcomes for people around the world,” said Fady Jameel, president of Community Jameel International. “Health care has been an important sphere of activity for Community Jameel since our earliest days, from founding the first nonprofit hospital for physical rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia, to partnering with the King Salman Center for Disability Research. J-Clinic continues our journey of supporting cutting-edge research and driving innovation in health care, in Saudi Arabia and around the whole world.”