NEW YORK – Coral Genomics said on Wednesday that it has partnered with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation on a study of inflammatory bowel disease.
Coral, a San Francisco-based precision medicine startup, will look to demonstrate the applicability of its functional response score clinical test in an IBD patient cohort. The company will study up to 1,000 patients in the foundation's IBD Plexus cohort.
Financial and other details of the agreement were not disclosed.
"While advances in IBD treatments have enabled improvement in clinical outcomes, development of tools that can predict which therapy will work best for each individual patient is critical," Angela Dobes, VP of IBD Plexus at the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation, said in a statement. "IBD Plexus was designed to accelerate getting answers to this critical need, and so we were eager to work with Coral Genomics in leveraging data and bio samples housed within IBD Plexus towards achieving a shared goal of advancing progress towards precision medicine."
Spending on autoimmune disease medication in the US totals more than $70 billion per year and has recently exceeded spending on cancer medications, according to Coral CEO Atray Dixit. "Patients and doctors often face a painful trial-and-error process to find a medication that works for them," he said in a statement.
Coral's approach integrates patient clinical history, demographics, and immune cell biology into models of patient response to autoimmune therapies. Founded in 2018, the company is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator and has won $2 million in Small Business Innovation Research funding from the National Institutes of Health and raised approximately $2 million in seed funding.
The study will be part of Coral's larger REEF clinical trial, which addresses other autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.