#HowWeScience

At the Broad Institute, researchers are revealing deep biological insights about the causes of disease, which are leading to new ways to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients with greater precision. These include new tools that help predict diseases well before symptoms appear, and more effective therapeutics that reduce the chance of relapse or drug resistance.

Illuminating human disease

Cancer dependency map

Cataloging the genetic adaptations that cancer cells rely on and leveraging them to develop new treatments

Food allergies

Understanding why the body sometimes overreacts to certain types of food

Genomic epidemiology

Using genomics to understand and track the spread of pathogens, and bring them under control.

Inflammatory bowel disease

Exploring the genetic origins of Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and related diseases to better prevent and treat them

Psychiatric disorders

Charting a path to new therapies by unraveling the genes and mechanisms that drive psychiatric disease

Single-cell genomics

Revealing the inner life of cells, one cell at a time

Machine learning

Developing and using computational tools to detect subtle patterns in biomedical data.

Reading and editing genomes

Connecting variants to function

Discovering how thousands of tiny genetic alterations lead to disease

Gene editing

Harnessing a natural system to precisely edit the DNA of living things

Genomics Platform

Creating foundational genomics resources and capabilities to understand health and disease

Human Cell Atlas

A comprehensive reference map of all human cells as a basis for understanding human health and disease

Developing diagnostics and treatments

Blood biopsies

Enabling clinicians to monitor the progress of a patient’s cancer through blood samples, rather than invasive procedures

Drug Repurposing Hub

Finding new opportunities for old drugs to treat common diseases

SHERLOCK

Ensuring the SHERLOCK diagnostic platform is easily accessible, especially in the developing world, where the need for inexpensive, reliable, field-based diagnostics is the most urgent

COVID-19 PCR Diagnostic

Processing COVID-19 PCR tests to support public health efforts

Understanding Kidney Disease

Uncovering a genetic culprit, MUC1

Using genomics to predict disease risk

Predicting a person’s genetic risk for many common diseases by scanning subtle variants across the genome

Sharing data and tools to enable discovery

Aggregating and harmonizing data

Uniting sequencing data from large-scale projects and making it available to the scientific community

Cloud computing

Partnering with technology leaders to make Broad data and tools available to researchers across the globe on secure, cloud storage platforms

Creating tools to generate data insights

Building open and scalable data-science tools to advance biomedical research

Human Cell Atlas: Data Coordination Platform

Data generated from studying trillions of cells are open and accessible to researchers worldwide.

Licensing data, tools, and technologies

Making science available to the world to maximize public benefit

Building communities

Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

Collaborating internationally to create standards to effectively store, share, analyze, and protect genomic and clinical data

Human Cell Atlas: International collaboration

A global consortium of thousands of scientists is building a complete reference map of all human cells.

Patients as partners

Working with patients with cancer, rare diseases, and other conditions to accelerate the pace of discovery and find better treatments

Collaborating, innovating, and empowering

Our Culture

Creating a diverse, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative community

Partner institutions and community

Bringing together some of the most talented physicians, biomedical researchers, data scientists, software engineers, and more to address the most urgent and ambitious scientific challenges in human health.