Edge Medicine has been named one of four Laude Institute Moonshot Labs. The new Center for Edge Medicine will build the open infrastructure, care models, and AI methods needed to extend healthcare beyond the clinic and into the Edge.
The Moonshot
Moonshots is a research competition from the Laude Institute that asked the world’s leading AI researchers a simple question: if you had the resources, how would you use AI to solve humanity’s hardest problems? More than 600 researchers from 47 institutions answered with 125 proposals across four areas: accelerating scientific discovery, advancing frontline healthcare, strengthening civic discourse, and reskilling the workforce.
This spring, Edge Medicine was named one of eight seed awardees and given six months to develop a full proposal for a $10 million multiyear Moonshot Lab. In October, we presented that vision at Moonshots // ONE Demo Day in San Francisco and were selected as one of four Labs.
Moonshots follows the research model pioneered by Dave Patterson, Founding Board Chair of the Laude Institute and Chair of the Moonshots Selection Committee, whose labs produced breakthroughs like RISC and Spark: small interdisciplinary teams, working systems rather than papers alone, firm timelines, and open work that others can build on.
Healthcare’s true frontline
Healthcare will change in the next five years. The question is what it will change into.
Today, there is an unacceptable gap between the care people receive and what is already possible with AI. Our care system is reactive, built to wait until people are already sick. Yet most of health happens far from the clinic, 24/7 at the Edge, where we live, work, and play. Chronic disease shows what’s at stake: seven conditions affect 3 in 4 Americans and drive 90% of the nation’s $5.3 trillion in annual healthcare costs.
Advances in generative AI and wearable sensors now make a new model of care possible. Closing the gap means changing healthcare at the system level, not one disease at a time. Data, computation, and care must flow seamlessly from daily life into the health system and back again. That is Edge Medicine: intelligent care that keeps learning and supports people around the clock, from the first sign of change at the Edge to the most complex specialty care.
“We are at a moment in human history in which we have more power. As a species than we’ve ever had. Any one person in this room can have an impact on every other person who’s standing, your children’s futures, my children’s futures… Whether they feel a world of hate and unsafety. Or whether they feel a world where technology has brought people closer together and fostered community and healthy discourse and respect… Please continue to work on the problems that you’re working on and take that to heart and inspire other academics and non-academics to work on those same species-level problems.”
The foundation
Over the past six months, we shared the Edge Medicine vision with patients, clinicians, and leaders across health systems, universities, and industry, and built a strong coalition of partners behind it. The response was clear: people want this future, and they want it now.
The Center builds on a strong foundation already in place:
- JupyterHealth: open source infrastructure built on Project Jupyter that securely brings together data from wearables and medical records for patients, researchers, and care teams
- iCKM care at UCSF, the Center’s first prototype: a new integrated Cardio-Kidney-Metabolic care (iCKM) model that brings Edge Medicine to patients
- The care model becomes the learning system: clinical foundation models and reinforcement learning methods that learn from every patient and help choose the right care for each one
- The Edge Medicine Innovation Challenge: inviting interdisciplinary teams to propose how they would use JupyterHealth to improve care at the Edge
What comes next
The Center for Edge Medicine will unite computer science and clinical care, with JupyterHealth as its foundation. We will demonstrate measurable improvements in patient care at UCSF and adapt the model for other conditions and health systems. We will make it easier for new science to reach patients, grow an ecosystem of companies and builders around open infrastructure, and train the next generation of researchers working at the intersection of computation and health.
All of our work will be developed openly, so others can adopt and extend it.
The team
The Center for Edge Medicine is a bicampus initiative of UCSF and UC Berkeley, housed within Computational Precision Health (CPH).
Edge Medicine is led by Lead PI Ida Sim, MD, PhD, with Co-PIs Ahmed Alaa, PhD; Irene Chen, PhD; Fernando Pérez, PhD; and Maya Petersen, MD, PhD. Co-Investigators Jessilyn Dunn, PhD; Sandeep “Sunny” Kishore, MD, PhD, MSc; and JP Pollak, PhD, round out the leadership team. They are joined by clinicians, engineers, student researchers, and a strategy, operations, and communications team across UCSF, UC Berkeley, Duke, and Cornell. Meet the rest of the team.
Thank you
We are deeply grateful to the Laude Institute for championing open, ambitious research in the public interest, and to the Moonshots // ONE selection committee for their rigor and insight. Thank you also to the partners, supporters, and every member of our team whose dedication brought us here.
This is the time, and this is the team. Healthcare’s frontline is wherever people manage their health, and we invite you to be a part of the journey.
Join us in building what comes next. Get in touch