GenomOncology said today that its proprietary match algorithm and extensive Knowledge Management System (KMS) application programming interface (API) suite will be used by Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine to provide real-time clinical trial recommendations to clinical researchers treating IU patients, through a partnership whose value was not disclosed.
GenomOncology said IU is applying the company’s clinical trial APIs in order to enable the school’s clinical research teams to use a patient's clinical and genomic data to find genomically-relevant clinical trials.
“GenomOncology is excited to be working with IU’s Precision Health initiative to further IU’s goal of increasing cancer clinical trial participation,” GenomOncology CEO Manuel J. Glynias said in a statement. “We also share their longer-term aspirations: to find new treatments for cancer that lead to cures.”
The company’s KMS API suite is designed to enable precision health approaches by allowing researchers to aggregate and analyze biomarker-based data using annotations that include genes, pathways, drugs, alterations, transcripts, and diseases—what GenomOncology calls its “genomics-aware” framework.
“The KMS ‘understands’ where genes are on chromosomes, what exons make up a gene and how those exons make up transcripts, which proteins are coded for by the gene and its domains, and what role the protein plays in cellular pathways,” GenomOncology states on its website. “The KMS also contains ontologies for diseases and therapies. Assertions (i.e. rules) added to the KMS leverage these ontologies, so that rules can represent knowledge in the form used by oncologists.”
GenomOncology’s KMS clinical trial database contains more than 2,900 clinical trials curated for comprehensive clinical reporting by My Cancer Genome, a web-based precision cancer medicine tool for physicians, patients, caregivers and researchers that was developed by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center investigators in 2011, and supported by GenomOncology.
The company said it was chosen by IU after a technical review and trial matching evaluation with test data.
2020 Vision
The partnership is part of Indiana University's Precision Health Initiative (IUPHI), which is conducting clinical trials in triple negative breast cancer, multiple myeloma and pediatric sarcomas.
IUPHI arose from IU’s Grand Challenges Program, with the goal of discovering and developing cures for multiple myeloma, triple negative breast cancer and pediatric sarcoma—as well as delaying progression of, and ultimately preventing, Type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
Those goals correspond to a set of commitments the Initiative has made, for which it plans to use $120 million from the University. By 2020, IUPHI aims to cure at least one cancer and at least one childhood disease, and develop preventive solutions for one chronic illness and one neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s.
IUPHI lists one active research study on its website: a Person to Person Health Interview Study whose researchers this fall are planning to send invitations to 2,000 Indiana households at randomly selected addresses, alerting them that an interviewer will be coming to their home to personally ask them to participate in the study.
“We are doing this research study because we are trying to find out more about how genetics and environment affect how and why people become sick and what helps them get and stay healthy,” according to the study’s webpage. “We will study the survey answers, saliva samples and personal health information from Indiana residents. We do not know today what health problems will be important to study tomorrow, so the small amount of saliva you give will be stored and used by researchers at a later time.
Samples and personal health information will be stored in the Indiana Biobank, located on the IU School of Medicine campus.
IUPHI is led by Anantha Shekhar, Associate VP for Clinical Affairs at IU and Executive Associate Dean for Research at the IU School of Medicine.
