Centerstone Research Institute - Mapping Hypothesis Testing in a Health Care Environment
About Jeff Hammerbacher
Jeff Hammerbacher, cofounder of Cloudera and an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has focused his recent work on applying data science to biomedical research, particularly cancer immunotherapy. In a 2020 talk, he described a relation extraction project on biomedical literature aimed at understanding T cell function and differentiation, noting that immune checkpoint blockade is forecast to generate over $100 billion in sales by 2024 and that over 2,000 clinical trials for such therapies are active. He has emphasized the importance of open science, stating that his lab’s pipeline, epiD, is open source under an Apache 2.0 license and that all development occurs publicly on GitHub to allow others to reperform analyses. Hammerbacher has also spoken about the challenges of translating high-throughput web experimentation to healthcare, arguing that the field needs to conceive of healthcare delivery as a high-frequency, low-cost touchpoint with patients to enable rapid learning. He has criticized the tendency of institutions to outsource data infrastructure to large tech companies, calling such use cases “just marketing” from a Silicon Valley perspective. In earlier talks, he discussed the ethical implications of data collection, stating that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” and that decisions about what to measure involve “implicit political, moral, and ethical choices.”