I fully admit that I only skimmed the abstract, but was reminded of an article in Wired about Sergey Brin and his "search for a parkinsson cure".

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-sergeys-search/

He went backwards and started with just collecting an absurd amount of data. Later while talking to a researcher he could confirm years of research with a "simple" search in his database.