At a symposium November 8 on Transforming the Future of Human Health, Dean George Daley announced the commitment to HMS of $200 million by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the largest gift in the school's history. The gift will help propel the School’s mission of transforming health through curiosity-driven research that stimulates development of new therapies and the creation of new tools to diagnose, prevent and treat disease.

When DBMI Chair Isaac Kohane spoke about the intellectual communities that will usher in this transformation, he cited keystone examples that have come out of the department such as the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, which brings together diverse experts across the country to solve the most difficult medical mysteries; SMART on FHIR and Sync for Science, technologies that are being leveraged by NIH to enroll the nation's citizens in the million-person precision medicine study called All of Us, as well as by Apple Health Kit; early prediction of intimate partner violence based on longitudinal histories found in electronic health records; and the Network of Enigmatic Exceptional Responders (NEER), a People-Powered Medicine study collecting the broadest possible data on cancer patients to find out how they beat the odds.