April 23, 2013
Aridhia, academic, NHS and industrial partners to drive fusion of genomic and patient data to enable faster, more accurate clinical decisions.
Edinburgh, UK – 23 April, 2013 – Biomedical informatics company Aridhia today announced that it is a lead commercial partner alongside Life Technologies Corporation, a global biotechnology tools company, in the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC). The SMS-IC is set to bring together expertise from within Scottish industry, academia and the NHS to drive forward a new age of stratified medicine globally, with the aim of offering improved, personalised healthcare treatments, tailored to the genetics of individual patients.
“The Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre is a globally significant program to determine the future of healthcare in the 21st century and Aridhia is very proud to be part of it. With the cost of sequencing an individual’s genome continuing to fall rapidly, we need to understand how to find and unlock the associations with clinical and patient data in order to improve diagnosis and to personalise the treatment of disease to the individual. Do this, and we can change the way in which healthcare is delivered forever.
“Aridhia will provide the biomedical informatics platform and expertise required to collect, manage and analyse the vast volume and diversity of data that is needed to realise the potential of stratified medicine, while Life Technologies will deliver the DNA sequencing technology required to drive discovery and genetic analysis. Together, the two companies can support the development of detailed patient records integrating genomic and clinical data in order to explore the complex relationships between biological pathways and drug response.”
Dr David Sibbald, Chairman and CEO of Aridhia.
The Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre aims to build on recent advancements in biomedical research which have begun to identify why people with the same disease do not behave in the same way, and why treatments are more effective for some people than others.
Current methods of managing illness, with standardised, a one-size-fits all trial and error medications and treatment pathways, are not always fit for purpose. Combining and analysing an individual’s detailed genomic data with more traditional patient information will enable a move away from standardised to targeted treatments for groups of patients most likely to benefit.
However, while single gene testing is currently available within the NHS, significant advances in stratified medicine are being hampered by the challenge around the interoperability, analysis and interpretation of the huge amounts of data created about each patient. Aridhia’s sophisticated biomedical informatics technologies will provide the SMS-IC with the platform required to analyse these huge amounts of clinical, patient, imaging and genomic data and provide a comprehensive picture of factors affecting each patient’s treatment and healthcare outcomes.
“By combining our expertise with that of our academic, clinical and commercial partners, the SMS-IC will support the creation of new knowledge to inform the delivery of quality healthcare across the world and create economic growth for Scotland.”
Dr David Sibbald, Chairman and CEO of Aridhia.
The immediate aim of SMS-IC is to enable precision targeting of population subsets in order to demonstrate the benefit of stratification in clinical trials, with a series of projects commencing throughout 2013.
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