What You Should Know
- Function announced a research collaboration with NYU Grossman School of Medicine (part of NYU Langone Health) focused on developing next-generation AI models for early, preventive disease detection.
- The initiative pairs NYU Grossman’s deep, longitudinal clinical and treatment dataset with Function’s broad, multimodal health monitoring pipeline—ingesting routine biomarker labs and advanced imaging scans before and after disease onset.
- Initial clinical focus areas target early cancer warning signals, longitudinal brain health monitoring, and predictive cardiometabolic risk stratification.
- The partnership accelerates Function’s Medical Intelligence Lab™ (MIL), co-directed by Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson, to construct a predictive “GPS” for long-term health management.
- The research launch follows Function’s Q2 acquisitions of Getlabs and SuppCo, as well as a $450M growth financing round led by General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
How Function’s Longitudinal Data Infrastructure Shifts Medicine Upstream
The collaboration combines two distinct health datasets: NYU Grossman’s longitudinal clinical data tracking how illness progresses and is treated in patient populations, alongside Function’s multimodal, longitudinal testing data captured across a broad U.S. population before and after disease onset.
The research initiative will focus on three primary clinical areas:
- Early Cancer Detection: Identifying subtle blood and imaging biomarkers to detect early-stage malignancies.
- Brain Health & Cognitive Risk: Evaluating longitudinal neurological changes over time to monitor cognitive decline risks.
- Cardiometabolic Risk: Developing predictive models to assess long-term heart and metabolic health trajectories.
“The history of medicine is a chronicle of remarkable advances in technology, but for too long we have used our best tools last,” said Dr. Sodickson, Chief Medical Scientist at Function and former Chief of Innovation in Radiology at NYU Langone. “This partnership flips that script… pairing Function’s multifaceted view of health as it unfolds with NYU Grossman’s world-class understanding of disease and its treatment.”
