Join us for a conversation with Peter Donnelly (Queensland & Balliol 1980), Vivian Lee (Oklahoma & Balliol 1986) and Vishal Gulati (India & 1995) on fostering innovation and resource sharing in healthcare and biomedical research

We live in the age of data-driven economies. Big data has already revolutionized the way we buy, consume media, advertise, and communicate. Now, it is beginning to reshape the biomedical sciences. With wearables, digital health, precision medicine, and genetic testing, the revolution in data-driven healthcare is fast upon us. The central dogma of data-driven industries has been: "Who owns the data, owns the technology and the products". This opens up a trade-off: how can we make the resource 'data' equitably shared while protecting personal privacy? Will the advent of big data in medicine only benefit big companies or will it give small companies the chance to innovate? What role do public projects such as the UK Biobank play? And how can we make sure the benefits of data-driven healthcare reach all patients?

Speakers:

Peter Donnelly (Queensland & Balliol 1980), CEO of Genomics PLC and Professor of Statistical Science at University of Oxford

Vivian Lee (Oklahoma & Balliol 1986), President of Health Platforms, Verily

Vishal Gulati (India 1995), Venture Capital Investor

Moderated by:

Peter Holderrieth (Germany & New College 2019). MSc, Neuroscience

Professor Sir Peter Donnelly is co-founder and CEO of Genomics plc and Emeritus Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford where he was Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics from 2009-2017. Peter grew up in Brisbane and after graduating from the University of Queensland he studied for a doctorate in mathematics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. A successful academic career followed, and after Professorships at the Universities of London (where he became a professor at age 29, at the time the youngest professor in the UK) and Chicago, he returned to Oxford in 1996.

He has been centrally involved in many of the major human genetics projects over the last 20 years, playing a major role in the International HapMap Project, the successor to the Human Genome Project, and later chairing the landmark Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and its successor (a large international collaboration studying the genetic basis of more than 20 common human diseases and conditions in over 60,000 people). More recently he led an Oxford collaboration with Illumina to sequence the genomes of 500 individuals with a range of clinical conditions to assess the potential for whole-genome sequencing in clinical medicine - a study which led to the NHS 100,000 Genomes Project, and led the genetic work culminating in the genotyping of all 500,000 participants in UK Biobank.

In 2014, Peter and 3 colleagues, including Gil McVean the then inaugural director of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, founded Genomics plc, with Peter becoming the company’s CEO in 2017. Genomics now employs over 100 people, with offices in Oxford and Cambridge, UK, and Cambridge Massachusetts. It has developed an extensive data platform linking genetic variation in humans to phenotypic outcomes, and powerful statistical and machine learning tools to jointly analyse the data. Genomics uses this in two ways, in Therapeutics to find novel drug targets, and in Precision Health to develop and deploy powerful risk prediction tools for population health and clinical decision support.

Peter has received numerous awards for his research, including a knighthood in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the understanding of human genetics in disease. His TED talk has been downloaded over a million times. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.

Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., is the author of The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone (Norton). She is President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences. A physician and health care executive, Lee also serves as a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Prior to joining Verily, Lee served as the Dean of the Medical School and CEO of the University of Utah Health Care, an integrated health system with a budget of $3.6 billion, including a 1400 member physician group and health insurance plan. During her tenure, she led University of Utah Health to recognition for its health care delivery system innovations that enable higher quality at lower costs and with higher patient satisfaction, and superior financial performance. In 2016, University of Utah was ranked first among all university hospitals in quality and safety (Vizient). Dr. Lee previously was the inaugural Chief Scientific Officer of New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

Elected to the National Academy of Medicine with over 200 peer-reviewed publications, Lee serves on the Board of Directors of the Commonwealth Fund, the Board of Trustees of Boston Children’s Hospital, and is also a director on the board of Zions Bancorporation, a publicly traded company.

Dr. Lee is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, received a D.Phil in medical engineering from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earned her M.D. with honors from Harvard Medical School, and her MBA from NYU. She was named by Modern Healthcare as one of the 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives in 2020.

Dr. Vishal Gulati is a venture capital investor focusing on companies at the intersection of data and health sciences. As a partner at Draper Esprit, a leading European venture capital firm, he led investments and severs on the boards of Evonetix, Fluidic Analytics, Clue, Push Doctor, Lifesum, Ieso Digital Health and Horizon Discovery. He is also an investor in Zoe, Kherion Medical, Arctoris and Quit Genius.

Vishal has played an active role in translating high quality academic research into successful commercial enterprises in the Europe. He continues to do this by helping organisations such as Oxford Science Innovation, the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK (world’s largest funder of cancer research) identify most promising science in their portfolios that can have real world applications.

Prior to this, Vishal worked at Atlas Venture and The Wellcome Trust. Vishal trained as a medical doctor and a clinician scientist and received his postgraduate medical training in the UK at the Nuffield Department of Medicine (Oxford) and Department of Medicine (Imperial College, London) as a Rhodes Scholar

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Technology & Society:Biotech -Big data in healthcare + biomedical research