Precision health software company LifeOmic, announced a partnership late last week with the Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank, a biobank established by researchers at Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center and Indiana University School of Medicine, is the world’s only epository in the world for normal breast tissue and matched serum, plasma and DNA.
LifeOmic and the Komen Tissue Bank will work together to deploy the Virtual Tissue Bank onto LifeOmic’s Precision Health Cloud (PHC) a secure and scalable platform. The new platform will allow researchers around the world to query an extended data model including whole-genome sequencing data. The use of analytics tools in the PHC allows researchers to overlay data reported from participants’ clinical history with all other data available in the PHC, including genomic, clinical and imaging data.
“We are passionate about sharing our research resources with scientists worldwide,” said Jill Henry, chief operating officer of the Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Cancer Center. “Using LifeOmic’s PHC will expand the Virtual Tissue Bank’s capabilities to help fuel ongoing treatment and prevention discovery.”
The Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Cancer Center will use the PHC for genomic, clinical and imaging data aggregation and analysis, as well as its health care compliant survey capabilities.
The tissue bank advances breast cancer research by offering high quality, richly annotated tissue samples to scientists worldwide. Scientists who access the Komen Tissue Bank’s Virtual Tissue Bank can query the medical history of donors, request tissue and download existing data. The current system does not support genomic data.
“The Precision Health Cloud was created to break down silos that exist between current systems, to help advance precision health,” said Dr. Don Brown, CEO and founder of LifeOmic. “We are thrilled to partner with the Komen Tissue Bank because of our shared goal to break down silos and help its mission to end breast cancer by enabling advanced research using PHC.”
