Apple’s ResearchKit initiative

Consumer tech giant Apple, which has spent considerable effort positioning its products as health and fitness helpers, has just hired someone who knows Big Pharma and Big Data. Stephen Friend, a veteran of drug R&D and, more recently, a nonprofit effort to foster more collaborative biomedical research and more data sharing, is joining Apple in an unspecified capacity. The news emerged today from Sage Bionetworks, the Seattle nonprofit that Friend founded after leaving drug giant Merck, where he was a senior research executive for eight years...

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