Human Longevity Inc. is tapping into Cleveland Clinic’s GeneBank, with the aim of discovering new disease-causing genes and disease pathways associated with heart disease.
The San Diego-based J. Craig Venter outfit and Cleveland Clinic say they’re applying whole genome, cancer and microbiome sequencing to better understand the biological basis for heart disease, so as to allow for earlier intervention and improved therapy.
“This very broad agreement with Cleveland Clinic could cover an unlimited number of things, but we’re starting with a well-characterized cardiovascular cohort,” Venter told MedCity News. “Their data is exactly the kind of thing we’re looking for.”
So while this collaboration begins with heart disease, it could extend to cancer or even a wide range of rare disease, Venter said.
The Cleveland Clinic’s GeneBank contains tens of thousands of samples, collected over the course of 20 years. While this Human Longevity pilot will only involve the data from 1,000 patients, there’s a great deal of potential moving forward to collect and sequence thousands more samples, said Charis Eng, chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute.
This fits in with Human Longevity’s M.O., which involves sequencing and analyzing thousands of whole genomes each month so as to better understand the molecular basis of aging and disease progression. It already has a number of similar partnerships underway, with organizations like Genentech, Celgene and King’s College London.
“Cleveland Clinic has these precious samples of DNA, and Human Longevity has the firepower with lots of the newest, most cutting-edge sequencers,” Eng said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Indeed, Human Longevity’s deploying Illumina’s HiSeq X10 – the sequencer that can churn out multiple samples at once, in about a day, at about $1,000 a pop. Since its 2013 launch, Human Longevity’s churned out some 95,000 sequenced genome, and aims for 1 million by 2020.
“In medicine we are constantly exploring opportunities to better understand how diseases develop and what we can do to either prevent or provide the most impactful and effective course of treatment,” Dr. Toby Cosgrove, president and CEO of Cleveland Clinic, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be advancing the correlation of genomic data with clinical care.”
The roots of this collaboration go way back, Venter said – he and Cosgrove have known each other decades, having served together in Vietnam. Since, they’ve spoken of melding gene sequencing with clinical study, and the time’s right now to do something about it, Venter said.
“This is the outcome of many of those conversations,” Venter said.
