Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

Drawing on Patient Experience

Roche's Genentech has signed an agreement with PatientsLikeMe, a company that provides an online health information-sharing platform, to gain access to its data, MIT's Technology Review reports.

At PatientsLikeMe's website, patients with a range of conditions share information about their symptoms, treatments, and more, Tech Review says, adding that the largest networks are of patients with fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, though thousands of other diseases are also represented.

This five-year agreement gives Genentech the ability to use PatientsLikeMe’s Global Network Access service and access to de-identified data.

Co-founder Ben Heywood tells Tech Review that their hope is that information shared by people using their platform will uncover unmet patient needs.

“We envision a world where patient experience drives the way diseases are measured and medical advances are made," Jamie Heywood, a co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe, says in a statement.

Tech Review notes that financial details were not disclosed.

The Scan

Genetic Ancestry of South America's Indigenous Mapuche Traced

Researchers in Current Biology analyzed genome-wide data from more than five dozen Mapuche individuals to better understand their genetic history.

Study Finds Variants Linked to Diverticular Disease, Presents Polygenic Score

A new study in Cell Genomics reports on more than 150 genetic variants associated with risk of diverticular disease.

Mild, Severe Psoriasis Marked by Different Molecular Features, Spatial Transcriptomic Analysis Finds

A spatial transcriptomics paper in Science Immunology finds differences in cell and signaling pathway activity between mild and severe psoriasis.

ChatGPT Does As Well As Humans Answering Genetics Questions, Study Finds

Researchers in the European Journal of Human Genetics had ChatGPT answer genetics-related questions, finding it was about 68 percent accurate, but sometimes gave different answers to the same question.