Competition was developed to encourage intersection of IT with life sciences research on two Hoosier health issues –
diabetes and opioid addiction
INDIANAPOLIS (March 27, 2020) – BioCrossroads today announced the winners of their DataX BioInnovation Challenge, a competition where innovators used data sets to identify and investigate a hypothesis aimed at improving two Indiana health issues – diabetes and opioid abuse. The Challenge was created to intersect life sciences and data research and encourage new ways of investigating traditional disease biology and public health outcomes’ questions. Founded on the premise that asking critical questions can leverage publicly available data sets, the Challenge sought to foster new solutions.
Indiana Poison Center at IU Health won the diabetes challenge with a prize of $10,000. Their experiment is focused on the unintentional ingestion of Type II diabetes oral medications which can cause devastating hypoglycemia in children and adults. They will determine exposure rates of unintentional type II diabetes medications in both children and adults, as well as create outreach programs to educate the community on these risks.
A team from the Parkview Health Mirro Center for Research and Innovation won $15,000 for their opioid addiction submission. They will be taking publicly available data resources as well as other opioid crisis variables to determine where variables can be used to predict where treatment facilities may be needed in the future throughout the state of Indiana. They will also evaluate the impact of current treatment facilities to the regions where they have been placed. BioCrossroads will be facilitating introductions with key individuals in state government that could benefit from this analysis.
The teams will share the results of their experiments at the BioCrossroads’ Indiana Life Sciences Summit on Oct. 7, 2020.
“The use of data sets is increasingly important to make new discoveries and protocols in public health settings and to combat Hoosier health issues,” said Darshan Shah, chief data officer, BioCrossroads. “We are eager to see how these two experiments in diabetes and opioid addiction make progress over the coming months, and learning how their outcomes can lead to solutions.”
The presenting sponsor of the BioCrossroads DataX BioInnovation Challenge is Taft Law. Additional sponsors are BlackInk, Eli Lilly and Company, Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, Kronos, Regenstrief Institute, and Roche Diagnostics.
About BioCrossroads
BioCrossroads (www.biocrossroads.com) is Indiana’s initiative to grow, advance and invest in the life sciences, a public-private collaboration that supports the region’s existing research and corporate strengths while encouraging new business development. BioCrossroads invests capital and provides support to life sciences businesses, launches new life sciences enterprises (Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, 16 Tech, Indiana Health Information Exchange, Fairbanks Institute for Healthy Communities, BioCrossroadsLINX, OrthoWorx and Datalys Center), expands collaboration and partnerships among Indiana’s life science institutions, promotes science education and markets Indiana’s life sciences industry.