Geisinger Health System is launching a partnership with Indivumed to bank and quickly preserve samples from consenting cancer patients undergoing surgical tumor removal.
A developer for individualized oncology technology, Indivumed will help the hospital system gather samples and strengthen its data collection efforts. The partnership will permit Indivumed, based in Hamburg, Germany, to collect and analyze patient tissue that isn’t needed for clinical diagnosis, which will then be stored and used to develop new therapies, according to an announcement.
Indivumed has a massive biobank of tissue and data from more than 20,000 patients, with roughly 1,500 new cases being added a year. Indivumed’s banking process limits the time between removal of tissue from the body and the time it is preserved to less than 10 minutes, creating tissue samples of the highest biological integrity.
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The biobank will be integrated at Geisinger, with the goal of developing a joint platform for clinical research focused solely on tumor biology. The overall goal is to understand biological differences between tumors and how patients respond to treatment.
The partnership “will give Geisinger patients access to the most advanced cancer therapeutics in the country, close to where they live and work,” said Dr. Glenn D. Steele Jr., president and CEO, in a statement.
The health system’s advanced electronic health record and already collected clinical data will enable providers to “comprehensively analyze” a patient’s data, while providing a “unique opportunity to quickly translate new scientific discoveries into the practice of medicine,” said Hartmut Juhl, founder and chief executive officer of Indivumed.
