OpenMined is honored to endorse the American Science Acceleration Project (ASAP), a bipartisan initiative led by U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) with an ambitious goal of making American science ten times faster by 2030.
Why ASAP Matters
American innovations routinely take a decade or more to move from laboratory discovery to products that improve lives. AI has already demonstrated 10x to 1000x speedups in the computational steps underlying drug design, materials discovery, and clean-energy development, but the lack of appropriate infrastructure is holding back a broader revolution. American researchers have sparse access to data, insufficient computing power, and an unclear regulatory environment for turning breakthroughs into deployments. ASAP aims to tackle this directly, making a big bet on scientific infrastructure to be as transformative for the American economy as the interstate highway system.
Where OpenMined Fits In
The initiative is organized around five pillars — Data, Compute, AI, Collaboration, and Process. The Data pillar calls for scientific data to be accessible through intuitive, secure, and interoperable platforms, resulting in the world’s largest collection of scientific data. However, the most valuable scientific data, from clinical trials to proprietary experiments, sits locked away in institutions due to legitimate privacy concerns. Our tools let researchers query and learn from sensitive datasets without ever exposing the underlying data, which can support exactly the kind of secure data infrastructure ASAP envisions.
Looking Ahead
The path to faster, more impactful science runs through unlocking the utility of data tucked away in scientific institutions across the country, and that’s the challenge we’re built to help solve. We’re proud to stand alongside ASAP’s growing coalition and the Senate champions leading this initiative, and we look forward to the work ahead!
