Sage Bionetworks said in a press release that its Chairman and co-founder, Dr. Stephen Friend has teamed up with Apple. “Dr. Friend has accepted a position with Apple Inc., where he will work on projects related to health”, reads the statement. He will remain as Chairman of the Board of Sage in the same way.
Sage Bionetworks was one of the partners in the launch for ResearchKit, that Apple released in March 2015 to accelerate advanced medical research to allow medical professionals could create iOS applications, using all the iPhone sensors to collect anonymous data about various diseases and symptoms.
“Sage Bioneworks is definitely a great partner with which Apple works on health, but there is some kind of pseudo-interesante relationship between the two,” said Ahmed Albaiti, President of Medullan health care consultant.
According to Albaiti, Sage has a very “rich set of experts for medical resources”.
Prior to co-founding Sage Bionetworks, doctor Friend was one of the leaders of research in Oncology for Merck & Co. He had also served on the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
Sage has designed and set up two of the first five studies ResearchKit: application mPower focused on Parkinson’s disease, which later became one of the first applications enabled CareKit, and Share The Journey focused on the survivors of breast cancer.
Also runs as a server, a set of software services that provide a collection of open source’s background and distribution of ResearchKit and mobile applications of health data based on CareKit. Since the launch of ResearchKit, Sage Bionetworks has helped develop and has captured data for other projects of mobile health.
The manufacturer of the iPhone recently sought a lawyer who focuses on the medical privacy you could ask about possible mergers and acquisitions. Last month, the head of Apple, Tim Cook reiterated a “huge interest” from your company in the health-based projects and pointed out that, in his opinion, health space is “ripe for simplicity and a new point of view”.
