Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital and Life Origin Co-Host High-Level Medical Big Data Symposium to Advance Real-World Evidence Generation

With the advancement of medical informatics and bioinformatics, leveraging healthcare big data for real-world studies to provide clinical evidence for evidence-based medicine has assumed an increasingly prominent role. However, truly effective utilization of clinical big data is far from straightforward. Clinical research based on healthcare big data poses new challenges to clinicians and researchers in terms of experimental design, data processing, and statistical analysis capabilities.

To promote the widespread adoption of clinical research using medical big data and to foster talent development in China, as well as to strengthen academic exchange, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, in collaboration with Life Singularity (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., convened a high-quality academic symposium on medical big data and clinical research. The event, which brought together clinicians and researchers from multiple leading Grade A tertiary hospitals across China, was held in Wuhan on November 19–20, 2018.

At the conference, more than a dozen experts shared their experiences and findings in conducting real-world studies using clinical big data. Among them were Professor Yu Shi, Chief Advisor at LifeSingularity, Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences, and Director of the Center for Genomics Analysis and Research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, as well as an FDA review expert; Professor Zemin Zhang, an internationally renowned expert in biotechnology for malignant tumors, Tenured Professor at the School of Life Sciences of Peking University, and a Chang Jiang Scholar; and Dr. Weiwei Tong, a senior expert in biostatistics and bioinformatics, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of LifeSingularity. Clinicians, clinical researchers, statistical analysts, hospital IT professionals, and other cross-disciplinary specialists from major hospitals across China—including Peking University People’s Hospital, Qilu Hospital, West China Second University Hospital, Tongji Hospital affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, and Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital—participated in lively discussions.

Dr. Shi Yu · Data Science and Precision Medicine

Professor Shi Yu delivered a presentation titled “Data Science and Precision Medicine,” introducing advances in international medical big data, as well as the latest research concepts, experimental design principles, and data analysis methods for real-world evidence studies. In his report, “Dynamic Features of the Tumor Microenvironment from a Single-Cell Perspective,” Professor Zhang Zemin presented progress on his genomics and clinical research at Peking University, along with his recently published article in Nature and another paper published last year in Cell that was listed among China’s Top Ten Scientific and Technological Advances of 2017. Dr. Tong Weiwei shared a high-impact paper soon to be published by Life Singularity and its partner hospitals, demonstrating through specific case studies how to conduct rigorous real-world clinical research and data analysis.

Hospitals have accumulated massive amounts of data during routine clinical practice. Although an increasing number of companies have recently emerged to assist hospitals in organizing clinical data, there remains an extreme scarcity of talent capable of leveraging these data to produce high-quality scientific research and extract valuable real-world evidence (RWE) that can serve as actionable standards for implementation. This conference made many clinicians and researchers acutely aware that the success or failure of real-world data studies hinges critically on factors ranging from top-level study design and the application of appropriate analytical methods to in-depth data governance.

Life Singularity’s interdisciplinary team is dedicated to helping hospitals unlock the value of their long-dormant medical big data assets. We integrate diverse heterogeneous data sources—including clinical information, medical records, health archives, laboratory results, biobanks, and omics research—and link them with existing knowledge bases, literature, and clinical guidelines, while performing in-depth data processing and quality control. In addition to providing a professional medical big data processing platform and expert support for data analysis and mining, Life Singularity places strong emphasis on cultivating interdisciplinary talent in clinical research and data analytics for its partner hospitals.