Case Study: Foundation for Precision Medicine achieves months-earlier Alzheimer’s detection and 5-10x faster ML development with Google Cloud Platform

Foundation for Precision Medicine Detecting Alzheimer’s disease earlier with big data

The Foundation for Precision Medicine is a U.S. nonprofit that uses AI and large-scale electronic health records to detect Alzheimer’s disease months or years before dementia symptoms appear. Faced with limited funding and slow, underpowered in‑house infrastructure, the team needed a rapid proof of concept and scalable analytics to develop accurate machine‑learning models from tens of thousands of patient records and millions in the control population.

By moving its data pipeline and analytics to Google Cloud (BigQuery, Cloud Dataprep, Compute Engine, BigQuery ML, Data Studio and more) — with support from Google’s Data Solutions for Change — the foundation completed its proof of concept in four months, increased dataset sizes and query speed by ~100x, and improved model AUC from 0.7 to 0.8. The switch reclaimed 70% of data‑team time for science, sped ML development 5–10x, and cut time to move from analysis to ML by about 25%, enabling faster, more collaborative research and the launch of a scalable detection app.

Foundation for Precision Medicine

Ayin Vala

Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist