Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher Teams With Mount Sinai School of Medicine to Solve Medical Challenges Using Big Data

Cloudera, the category leader that is setting the standard for Apache Hadoop in the enterprise, today announced that Cloudera Cofounder and Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher will be leading a revolutionary project with Mount Sinai School of Medicine to apply the power of Cloudera's Big Data platform to critical problems in predicting and understanding the process and treatment of disease.

"We are at the cutting edge of disease prevention and treatment, and the work that we will do together will reshape the landscape of our field," said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The Mount Sinai Medical Center. "Mount Sinai is thrilled to join minds with Cloudera."

As a founder of Cloudera, Hammerbacher fully appreciates the technology's potential for solving previously intractable or even un-askable questions in medicine. In concert with Mount Sinai's clinical and academic community, he will help to develop solutions designed to enable performance scalable data analysis and multi-scale measurements in areas such as genotype, gene expression and organ health for medical research and discovery. The new software will also provide real-time feedback and guidance for treatment to improve patient outcomes.

"We can improve healthcare delivery and treatment through new technology and acquired knowledge," said Eric Schadt, PhD, director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. "I am delighted that Jeff will be collaborating with the Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology and look forward to working together to dramatically change how we think about medical analysis and reporting."

Hammerbacher is enthusiastic about the implications of Big Data in medicine and, with support of Cloudera's Data Science team, will be dedicating a portion of his time to this collaboration. Areas of research include analysis of human and bacterial genomes, study of the metabolic pathways of normal and disease states in the organism, structure and function of molecules used in treatment of disease, and more.

"I'm excited to work closely with one of the world's best research and teaching hospitals, as we expand what it means to be in the Data Science field," Hammerbacher said. "The value of Hadoop lies not in the technology itself, but in the real world problems it can solve."

Solving practical problems is core to Cloudera's focus; recent examples include using Hadoop to gain new insights for the FDA on adverse drug reactions across up to four drug combinations, and helping Opower customers to be more energy efficient as a result of visibility and connections drawn from disparate data.

About The Mount Sinai Medical Center
The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Established in 1968, Mount Sinai School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States. The Medical School is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service. Consistently ranked in the top 20 hospitals in the United States, Mount Sinai is one of 12 integrated academic medical centers whose medical school ranks among the top 20 in NIH funding and US News and World Report and whose hospital is on the US News and World Report Honor Roll. Nearly 60,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients last year, and approximately 560,000 outpatient visits took place. For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/

About Cloudera
Cloudera, the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software, services and training, enables data driven enterprises to easily derive business value from all their structured and unstructured data. Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), available to download for free at www.cloudera.com/downloads, is the most comprehensive, tested, stable and widely deployed distribution of Hadoop in commercial and non-commercial environments. For the fastest path to reliably using this completely open source technology in production for Big Data analytics and answering previously un-addressable big questions, organizations can subscribe to Cloudera Enterprise, comprised of Cloudera Support and a portfolio of software including Cloudera Manager. Cloudera also offers consulting services, training and certification on Apache technologies. As the top contributor to the Apache open source community and with tens of thousands of nodes under management across customers in financial services, government, telecommunications, media, web, advertising, retail, energy, bioinformatics, pharma/healthcare, university research, oil and gas and gaming, Cloudera's depth of experience and commitment to sharing expertise are unrivaled. www.cloudera.com

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Reference Material
Rock Health Video: New Philosophy for Data Collection in Health with Jeff Hammerbacher, Health Innovation Summit 2012
Katie Fehrenbacher: How big data can track the pain points in population growth, GigaOm
Peter Cohan: Head in the Cloud, Hemispheres Magazine