AnalytiXIN: Industry and Academia Co-innovation to Benefit Life Sciences
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When I first joined the university as a managing director of its AnalytiXIN initiative, Bob Bernhard, Notre Dame’s Vice President for research, had a few words of inspiration for me. He quoted Notre Dame President Rev . John I. Jenkins, who once said we can’t be great unless the local community is great. The quote may not be exact, but it did provide the vision of what AnalytiXIN should become: among other things, an initiative to benefit the local communities.
AnalytiXIN is funded by the Lilly Endowment for the purpose of driving sustained innovation in Indiana by engaging the academic data science R&D talent with their industry partners. It involves three major Indiana universities – Indiana University, Purdue University, and University of Notre Dame – and several major corporations that are part of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership. Life sciences in this initiative are represented by such companies as Anthem, BioCrossroads, Eli Lilly, IHIE, IU Health, Indiana University School of Medicine, OneAmerica, and several others.
At University of Notre Dame, AnalytiXIN is a natural fit in the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, which facilitates transformative interdisciplinary research for societal impact. The Institute is working on behalf of the University to implement AnalytiXIN initiative at four different levels of engagement with Indiana companies, from strategic to educational. Its scientists have expertise in data science, artificial intelligence (AI), data engineering, computing, and applications. Its projects are aimed at using data and innovation to address specific societal challenges. One of the challenges that I plan to work on first as a managing director of AnalytiXIN at Notre Dame is health equity.
In Indiana, the issue of health equity was formally addressed in 2018, when the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) adopted an agency-wide health equity policy. There was a good reason to do so. According to research by IU Health, for example, black babies in Indiana are 2.5 times more likely to die in the first year of life compared to white babies, and people in high poverty areas are likely to face chronic disease inequities. Overall, social determinants such as socio-economic factors, physical environment, and health behaviors, represent one of the root causes of health inequity, as they account for about 80% of our health.
Understanding the relationship between social factors and access to health care is paramount. A lot of work is already being done by many organizations in the state, such as Indiana University Center for Health Equity, IU Health, Indiana Justice Project, CareSource, and others. What the AnalytiXIN initiative is bringing to the table is academic advancements in analytics and AI, not yet widely used, but quite promising given the current state-of-the-art.
Having joined forces with IU Health and BioCrossroads, we plan to evaluate the dynamics of health equity in Indiana since the adoption of health equity policy in the state. In the fall, we will organize a hackathon on health equity data, inviting participation from data scientists of all levels, from students to seasoned professionals. While we have some hypotheses to test, we look forward to some unexpected insights.
Why am I so sure we will find unexpected insights? Because data, especially on the scale available now, reflect the processes that are happening in real time and over time – including those we did not understand in the past. The newest tools of data science will help us find new relationships that data contain. Another benefit of using advanced analytics on large volumes of data is that it allows to turn diagnostics into predictions and prescriptions.
What we do not yet know, but hope to find through AnalytiXIN projects, should open doors to more projects that will make insights on health inequity actionable. Working on the development of life sciences in Indiana is probably the most important contribution that AnalytiXIN, in line with vision of Rev. Jenkins, can make to the local communities.
Dr. Valentina (Valya) Kuskova, MBA, PhD is Managing Director of the Notre Dame AnalytiXIN site at Indianapolis, and Professor of Practice at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society at the University of Notre Dame.