WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction Established at Weill Cornell Medicine

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Weill Cornell Medicine today announced a gift made by WorldQuant, LLC
(“WorldQuant”) and Igor Tulchinsky that will further realize the promise
of precision medicine. The $5 million gift establishes a new initiative
that will use predictive tools to enhance Weill Cornell Medicine’s
capability to diagnose and treat a variety of illnesses, with the goal
of improving outcomes for patients.

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The WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction brings together
financial and medical experts whose collaboration strives to enhance
biomedical research. Weill Cornell Medicine’s scientists, working
closely with researchers and technologists from WorldQuant, will deploy
predictive tools and quantitative methods to deepen the understanding of
genetic factors that drive disease in individual patients. Using
sophisticated algorithms, the new initiative will enable the research
team to analyze genomic data to identify patterns and trends that may
predict patients’ future risk of developing disease, as well as
potential outcomes. These insights may be used to improve the diagnosis
and treatment of a variety of illnesses, including cancer, neurological
disorders, cardiovascular diseases and infections.

Weill Cornell Medicine researchers Dr. Christopher Mason, the WorldQuant
Research Scholar, and Dr. Olivier Elemento, the Walter B. Wriston
Research Scholar, will lead the initiative, which will involve joint
work with physician-scientists at the Caryl and Israel Englander
Institute for Precision Medicine and the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer
Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.

“This outstanding gift will accelerate and expand Weill Cornell
Medicine’s approach to precision medicine, providing new predictive
tools that will lead to even better outcomes for patients,” said Jessica
Bibliowicz, chairman of the Weill Cornell Medicine Board of Overseers.
“We are very grateful to Igor Tulchinsky and WorldQuant, LLC for making
this initiative possible.”

“The use of quantitative prediction for patients represents an important
new tool at Weill Cornell Medicine,” said Dr. Augustine M.K. Choi, the
Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We appreciate
Mr. Tulchinsky’s generosity, which will help us achieve new goals in the
rapidly evolving field of precision medicine.”

For WorldQuant, an international quantitative investment management firm
founded by Mr. Tulchinsky, who is chairman and CEO, applying predictive
algorithms to medical research is a natural progression. “There is a
great opportunity to leverage the technology and proprietary algorithms
we’ve developed for use outside of the financial markets, particularly
around predictive medicine and cancer research, where the stakes are so
high,” said Mr. Tulchinsky, a member of the Board of Overseers at Weill
Cornell Medicine. “This initiative has tremendous possibilities, and I
am proud to help drive advances in the field.”

Drs. Mason and Elemento, as co-directors of the initiative, will
leverage new technologies to analyze clinical samples and visualize
various diseased tissues at single-cell resolution. These methods will
be combined with a supercomputing infrastructure, which includes
developing new software to crunch data using advanced
pattern-recognition algorithms to model disease progression.

One of the initiative’s ultimate goals is to give researchers the
ability to examine a blood draw or urine sample from one patient and
predict his or her future risk for developing a specific type of cancer.
The same technology could also give researchers the ability to rapidly
diagnose patients and predict which treatments might work, which
treatments may encounter resistance and how the disease is likely to
progress. In the future, this framework may enable investigators to
analyze single cells and molecules from blood, tumor biopsies, saliva or
other clinical samples collected from patients seeking care at Weill
Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center,
and then use analytical algorithms to create personalized predictive
models based on findings from longitudinal healthcare data collected
from thousands of patients.

To accomplish this, Drs. Mason and Elemento will work closely with
WorldQuant’s research team and intend to recruit software engineers and
experts in artificial intelligence who can develop innovative
quantitative prediction tools and analyze findings. They will continue
to provide advanced training in quantitative biology and modeling to
Weill Cornell Medicine’s physician-scientists to support this effort.

“We are looking forward to using the tools and methods that will result
from this philanthropic investment to tease apart disease cells’ secrets
and create predictive models of health for patients,” said Dr. Mason,
who is also an associate professor of physiology and biophysics, an
associate professor of computational genomics at the HRH Prince Alwaleed
Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine,
and an associate professor of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and
Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Not only does this
gift enable new science and predictive models in medicine, it also
creates an unprecedented collaboration between two big-data groups at
Weill Cornell Medicine and WorldQuant.”

“This incredibly generous gift will likely spur a whole new generation
of biomedical discoveries by helping bring predictive disease analytics
to precision medicine,” said Dr. Elemento, who is also associate
director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine and an associate
professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We’re
profoundly thankful to Igor for his support, and grateful to have
WorldQuant as a partner in pioneering new approaches to understanding
cancer, infections and neurological diseases.”

Weill Cornell Medicine

Weill Cornell Medicine is committed to excellence in patient care,
scientific discovery and the education of future physicians in New York
City and around the world. The doctors and scientists of Weill Cornell
Medicine — faculty from Weill Cornell Medical College, Weill Cornell
Graduate School of Medical Sciences, and Weill Cornell Physician
Organization — are engaged in world-class clinical care and cutting-edge
research that connect patients to the latest treatment innovations and
prevention strategies. Located in the heart of the Upper East Side’s
scientific corridor, Weill Cornell Medicine’s powerful network of
collaborators extends to its parent university Cornell University; to
Qatar, where an international campus offers a U.S. medical degree; and
to programs in Tanzania, Haiti, Brazil, Austria and Turkey. Weill
Cornell Medicine faculty provide comprehensive patient care at
NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian
Lower Manhattan Hospital and NewYork-Presbyterian Queens. Weill Cornell
Medicine is also affiliated with Houston Methodist. For more
information, visit weill.cornell.edu.

WorldQuant, LLC

WorldQuant, LLC is a global quantitative investment firm that was
founded in 2007 by Igor Tulchinsky and now has more than $5 billion in
assets under management. The firm has more than 20 offices in 15
countries and over 600 employees and 500 consultants. WorldQuant
develops and deploys systematic investment strategies across a variety
of asset classes in global markets, utilizing a proprietary research
platform and investment process. For more information on WorldQuant’s
culture and philosophy, please visit www.WeAreWorldQuant.com.

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