Genedata and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation completed a project aimed at advancing precision care for Crohn’s disease patients.
Genedata, a biopharmaceutical research and development software company, worked with foundation investigators and clinicians to integrate and study multi-omic and clinical data culled from patients with Crohn’s, which, along with ulcerative colitis, is among the most common forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
The data will be used to identify the biomarkers that can be the most useful in evaluating, within five years of IBD diagnosis, a person’s risk of developing disease complications that require surgery.
“Crohn’s disease is a chronic, often debilitating disease, for which there is currently no cure,” Andres Hurtado-Lorenzo, PhD, the foundation’s senior director of translational research, said in a press release. “Despite several treatment options, currently we lack predictive tests to determine the optimal treatment strategy early in the disease process, when the opportunity to improve outcomes is greatest.”
“There is a significant unmet need to advance new diagnostic tools to enable precision medicine approaches and to optimize patient care according to the severity of the disease course,” he said.
The foundation sought help with leveraging abundant clinical and molecular data. Multi-omics is an approach in which multiple datasets (such as genes or protein profiles) are combined and analyzed for new associations.
Genedata used its precision medicine software platform, Genedata Profiler, to provide data analysis that could advance biomarker research efforts. Biomarkers are useful in predicting disease trajectory, which is crucial to personalized treatment plan development.
“We decided to implement cutting-edge data analysis methods to integrate clinical and genomic data from patients, as a strategy to advance our biomarker research efforts,” Hurtado-Lorenzo said. “We are pleased to have found in Genedata a trusted and reliable partner who provided us with expert knowledge in big multi-omic data analysis.”
“This collaboration is helping us accelerate our search for precision biomarkers to prognosticate disease course and to guide early and effective personalized treatment decisions in Crohn’s disease patients,” he said.
Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Switzerland-based Genedata, said it’s difficult to analyze clinical data combined with rapidly growing, voluminous and complex multi-omic information.
“Our data science services, together with our Genedata Profiler platform, is set up to address this challenge and to enable our partners to make data-informed decisions on a per-project basis without having to build their own data infrastructure or hire data scientists,” he said. “We’re proud that our expertise has been helpful to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.”
The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation has the world’s largest repository of IBD patient data from institutions around the world. More than 3 million U.S. residents live with the disease.