Law Commons^™

Biobanks As Innovation Infrastructure For Translational Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Book Chapters

Biobanks represent an opportunity for the use of big data to drive translational medicine. Precision medicine demands data to shape treatments to individual patient characteristics; large datasets can also suggest new uses for old drugs or relationships between previously unlinked conditions. But these tasks can be stymied when data are siloed in different datasets, smaller biobanks, or completely proprietary private resources. This hampers not only analysis of the data themselves, but also efforts to translate data-based insights into actionable recommendations and to transfer the discovered technology into a commercialization pipeline. Cross-project technological innovation, development, and validation are all more difficult …

Medical Malpractice And Black-Box Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Book Chapters

The explosive proliferation of health data has combined with the rapid development of machine-learning algorithms to enable a new form of medicine: “black-box medicine.” In this phenomenon, algorithms troll through tremendous databases of health data to find patterns that can be used to guide care, whether by predicting unknown patient risks, selecting the right drug, suggesting a new use of an old drug, or triaging patients to preserve health resources. These decisions differ from previous data-based decisions because black-box medicine is, by its nature, opaque; that is, the bases for black-box decisions are unknown and unknowable.

Black-box medicine raises a …