“Through the Project Baseline study, we are aiming to engineer a true twenty-first century approach to health - in a preventive and personalized way,” said Dr. Adrian F. Hernandez, MD, MHS, professor of medicine at Duke and member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. “Instead of having the annual physical exam that has not changed in decades, we’re hoping to develop new platforms that will discover changes in health as they happen in meaningful and actionable ways. To do this successfully, we will partner with participants to learn and deliver the best approaches for every aspect of the study.”

“Currently, most of what we see as treating physicians are short snapshots in time of an individual and primarily after they are already ill. We are effectively missing a lot of valuable information years prior to illness,” said Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, chair of radiology at Stanford and director of the Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection. “We’re dealing with illness in the absence of a well-defined reference of healthy biochemistry, and this underscores the criticality of what we hope to achieve here. By focusing on the health of a broad population, we can eventually have a meaningful impact on the well-being of patients around the world.”


The Project Baseline data repository will be built on Google computing infrastructure and hosted on Google Cloud Platform, which meets rigorous compliance standards that test for data safety, privacy and security. De-identified Project Baseline study data will be available to qualified researchers for exploratory analysis in the future. Initial research goals include characterizing the variation in the observed physical and biochemical traits of the study population, or phenotypic diversity, and identifying biomarkers of disease-related transitions, including those related to cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The study’s scientific executive committee is composed of Dr. Mega; Dr. Hernandez; Dr. Gambhir; Andrew Conrad, PhD, chief executive officer of Verily; Eric Peterson, MD, MPH, director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute; and Kenneth Mahaffey, MD, vice chair of clinical research at Stanford. Beyond the scientific executive committee, the Project Baseline study will seek input from a diverse coalition of experts from across the life science and healthcare communities including academia, medicine, science, technology, data, design, engineering and patient advocacy groups.

“We have seen huge strides in cardiovascular disease research by better understanding specific disease patterns, causes and effects in defined populations over time,” said Nancy Brown, chief executive officer of the American Heart Association. “The Project Baseline study has the opportunity to significantly influence our current body of knowledge by better understanding the indicators of wellness. The outcome of this study could inspire a new generation of tools that are geared towards disease prevention versus just diagnosis and treatment.”

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