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| Dr. Stephen Friend |
Dr. Stephen Friend, founder of Sage Bionetworks, which developed apps for Apple's ($AAPL) ResearchKit, is moving on to work for the tech titan, effective immediately. In addition to his data experience at the open-science nonprofit, he brings 8 years of R&D experience from his time at Merck ($MRK).
The news came in a Sage announcement Thursday promoting Lara Mangravite to Friend's previous position as president. Friend will continue to serve Sage as chairman of the board. Friend and Apple did not comment on the move, but the Sage statement said he will be working on "health-related projects."
When Apple launched ResearchKit in March last year, Sage contributed two apps to its initial suite of 5 apps. More than 9,500 Parkinson's patients participated in a study using Sage's mPower app. They logged their daily activity, symptoms and how they took their medication. In March, the company released the data set to researchers working on Parkinson's treatments.
Sage's second study, using the Share the Journey app, is aimed at understanding why some breast cancer patients recover more quickly than others. Users log fatigue, mood, sleep disturbances and other data. Friend is the principal investigator on both studies.
Initiatives like ResearchKit and the Resilience Project--which Friend co-founded and which seeks to learn why some individuals with disease-causing genetic mutations stay healthy--turn up an unprecedented amount of data for research. But there are multiple questions about democratizing data collection. Ethical concerns include privacy for those who elect to share their health data, as well as compensation: What happens to data-sharers if their contribution results in a new treatment? And not only are the data skewed in favor of those who can afford an iPhone, but it could also be unreliable as all symptoms and activities are self-reported.
- here's the Sage statement