Inspire Founder and CEO Brian Loew announced a new initiative, the Inspire Research Accelerator, a program to accelerate medical progress by enabling academic researchers around the world—at no cost—to collaborate with Inspire.

“The Accelerator’s goal is to enable scientific discovery by connecting researchers with patients, especially those affected by rare diseases,” Loew said.

The Accelerator will help propel research in a variety of ways:

1. Unlocking research gaps using longitudinal instruments, especially for personalized medicine and rare diseases
2. Identifying and engaging with cancer and rare disease patient populations based on specific clinical trials experience and interest
3. Rapidly deploying validated Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) measurement tools
4. Furthering exploration of complex disease underpinnings by correlating structured and unstructured data and phenotypes reported by patients with other data types such as genomics/multi-omics and other biological data

Inspire also unveiled the Accelerator’s founding research partners: Nigam Shah, Assistant Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University; Don Dizon, Professor of Medicine, Brown University; Isabelle Boutron, Professor of epidemiology, Université de Paris; and Harlan Krumholz, Cardiologist and health care researcher, Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital.

“These are some of the world-class researchers with whom we’ve collaborated in the past,” said Loew, “and we look forward to working with them and others around the world.” Loew unveiled the Accelerator during his presentation today at World Orphan Drug Congress USA.