With a career spanning more than 25 years, Patrick Stoup serves as the CEO of SAI in Gaithersburg, Maryland. On top of the business activities that Patrick Stoup oversees, he also drives the company's charitable work, including its support and donations to the St. Jude Children's Hospital.
St. Jude Children's Hospital conducts research on pediatric cancer and other rare diseases. The nonprofit publishes its works in St. Jude Cloud, the world's largest public online resource of pediatric genomics data. The hospital has announced that it will be releasing its clinical genome sequencing data in an initiative that aims to be the first of its kind.
With the consent of its patients, St. Jude Children's Hospital looks to release data on genome, exome, and transcriptome every month to researchers. The initiative is in contrast to how such information was released in the past, which was typically retrospective.
Data from 685 patients are currently available through the platform, at no cost to medical professionals, with a further 273 data sets scheduled to be released in July. Additionally, St. Jude Children's Hospital plans to upload information from 500 patients every year. According to Jinghui Zhang, Ph.D., the chair of the Department of Computational Biology, the data will allow medical researchers to develop more precise treatments for childhood cancer and other diseases.
