USA –Flywheel, a company that provides data management platform for biomedical research and collaboration, has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The funding is intended to support research on the neurodevelopmental health of children growing up in poverty and other adverse environments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

According to the company, the multi-year grant will focus on providing a centralized, cloud-based research infrastructure to an international cohort of researchers led by King’s College London.

The research teams will use Flywheel’s platform to curate, share, and analyze MRI scans of young children between the ages of 0 and 24 months across 25 LMICs located in Africa and Asia.

Flywheel’s technology reportedly captures data from many sources, automate research workflows, and provide secure sharing between the research teams will increase productivity and eliminate the IT burdens normally associated with a multi-site initiative of this magnitude.

Professor Steven Williams, PhD, Professor of Neuroimaging Sciences at King’s College London, and a principal investigator on the project said, “We’re looking forward to leveraging Flywheel not only to make data easily accessible to our neuroimaging partners around the world, but also to develop shared analytic pipelines and maintain consistency and compatibility.

The research teams will use Flywheel’s platform to curate, share, and analyze MRI scans of young children between the ages of 0 and 24 months across 25 LMICs located in Africa and Asia.

This project will ultimately build the knowledge and analytic capacity of LMIC researchers, allowing them to further optimize neuro-focused interventions in their settings.”

We are honored to participate in this important project,” said Can Akgun, PhD, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Flywheel.

By leveraging our comprehensive research data solution, the team will now focus on gaining a deeper understanding of pediatric brain development rather than spending valuable time on management of data and computational workflows. We believe this research effort will make a major contribution to improving the health of future generations.”

Hyperfine’s MRI scanners have been used to acquire brain scans for this project, supported by grant funding from the Gates Foundation since 2021.

The data generated to date will be migrated to the Flywheel platform, where research teams will securely access and curate the data, leverage existing algorithms and generate custom ones with support from the Flywheel team.

Additionally, a direct connection will be established between Hyperfine and Flywheel for new scans going forward to ensure immediate access for quality checking and automated data pre-processing.

Minneapolis-based Flywheel was started by two Stanford researchers six years ago. They were looking for a better way to manage growing and increasingly complex research datasets.

Flywheel started with academic researchers as its customers, and has since added clinics and hospitals that have a research segment, and life sciences companies.

We are excited to help enable this important work in understanding brain development for those growing up in poverty,” said Jim Olson, CEO of Flywheel.

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