Lockheed looks to tackle health care technology

Company turns attention to IT sector. Group will address patient privacy, among other challenges.

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is more commonly known for its weapons business, building the most expensive fighter jet of all time or more recently moving into armored tanks.

But as defense spending remains sluggish, Lockheed Martin has set its sights on subjects including climate change, space travel and nuclear fusion.

Now Lockheed, which has an aircraft assembly plant in Marietta, has turned its attention to one of the most complicated frontiers of all: the human body.

The Bethesda, Marylandbased contractor announced an alliance of industry, government and academia this week to brainstorm the future of health-care technology. Members include Silicon Valley heavyweights Intel and Cisco as well as Montgomery College, a community college in suburban Maryland.

The group, known as the Healthcare Technology Alliance, will tackle some of the biggest challenges facing health care today, such as how to use precision medicine, how to protect patient privacy in the era of big data, how to improve veterans’ health and how to build a skilled scientific workforce of the future.

The alliance is a progression of Lockheed’s recent forays into the rapidly growing healthcare IT sector. Lockheed announced a partnership this year with Illumina, a San Diego firm that builds genetic sequencing machines. The two are studying the human genome by analyzing data from large populations. Illumina has also joined the alliance.

Last fall, Lockheed bought Syracuse health-care company Systems Made Simple, which specialized in digital healthcare work with the Veterans Administration.

At a launch event in Virginia last week, members of the alliance said the health-care industry is evolving at a rapid clip. To keep up and innovate, they said, government agencies, companies and educational institutions need to band together.

At its outset, most members are already involved in projects that could serve as pilots.

For instance, the Million Veteran Program is a Lockheed research project that aims to collect genetic data from volunteers to better understand diseases like diabetes and cancer, and military-related illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The program has amassed data from 400,000 veterans so far, said Alex Dickinson, Illumina’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives.