Hospitals, Diagnostics

6 Precision Medicine partnerships reflective of the new Intel Collaborative Cancer Cloud

Much like Intel's new Collaborative Cancer Cloud, several precision medicine partnerships are springing up around the country. Here are six more.

 

 

 

 

Intel just announced it has created a “Collaborative Cancer Cloud,” a precision medicine analytics platform built in partnership with several academic centers. It’s meant to allow researchers from various institutions share the deidentified genomic, imaging and clinical data of patients to conduct research – and ultimately reach some new breakthroughs in cancer science.

As Eric Dishman, the top healthcare guy – and cancer survivor – at Intel who is spearheading this project, pointed out in a blog:

You may be asking, “Haven’t we seen efforts like this before?”

We have. Such partnerships are wildly common – there are multiple precision medicine partnerships in place. Several have cropped up, in fact, just following President Obama’s announcement of the $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative.  Here are a few others:

1. AllScripts and NantHealth

Electronic health record purveyor AllScripts teamed up in March with billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s precision medicine outfit, NantHealth. The two companies are building out clinical decision support software that integrates genomic and proteomic analysis with the EHR. The idea, of course, is to help physicians make more informed treatment decisions after a next-gen diagnostic approach – and help monitor treatment efficacy.

2. IMS Health and Foundation Medicine

IMS Health, a health data analysis firm, is working with Cambridge biotech Foundation Medicine to examine, on a population health level, how effective precision medicine is in treating cancer. Foundation Medicine will contribute the genomic profiling of the cancers to IMS Health’s “Real-World Evidence” platform – allowing life sciences customers to search this data compilation for insights in clinical approaches and cost of care.

3. Indiana’s precision medicine initiative

Similarly, a coalition of researchers in Indiana are creating a comprehensive study on whether targeting therapy actually helps – and whether it improves a hospital’s bottom line. The effort involves Eskenazi Health, the Indiana Institute for Personalized Medicine, the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute. It’ll do pharmacogenic testing on some 2,000 patients, and use a control set of 4,000 to evaluate outcomes – and whether genomic testing improves outcomes.

4. IBM Watson and 14 cancer clinics

IBM will allow 14 cancer clinics in the U.S. and Canada to use its Watson computer system to choose therapies based on a patient’s genomic data. Watson is a powerful tool that’ll allow researchers to sift through the dense reams of genetic data in minutes – and choose therapies based on the information. Some of the participating systems include Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University, and University of Southern California Center for Applied Molecular Medicine.

5. California’s own Precision Medicine Initiative

California Gov. Jerry Brown launched a $3 million initiative in April to compile existing patient data, integrate it in health records and use it to evaluate potential therapies. Some applications? Under this program, UCSF just announced a one-size-fits-all test to determine if a patient’s ill from a virus, bacteria, fungus or parasite – and using precision medicine approach to apply and track therapies in patients.

6. precisionFDA

The Food and Drug Administration actually just jumped on this bandwagon as well – launching an open-source platform in partnership with Bay Area startup DNAnexus to help researchers evaluate next generation sequencing technologies used in diagnostic tests. There can be open collaboration around the tests’ accuracy and reproducibility. It’ll also help the scientific community crowdsource reference datasets, and importantly, help guide federal regulators in building out policy for NGS technology.

 

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