NEW YORK – Genuity Science said Thursday that it is teaming with Emory University to develop a population clinicogenomic database to support biomarker and drug target discovery and validation. The partnership initially will focus on neurogenerative conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
"Emory fits perfectly within our strategy of combining detailed clinical and longitudinal data from large-scale, powered cohorts of many thousands of patients with whole-genome sequence and other omic data to provide discoveries beyond the usual suspects of disease genes," Jeff Gulcher, chief scientific officer of Boston-based Genuity Science, said in a statement.
"We know there are dozens of genes contributing to risk of these conditions. I believe there's huge scope to improve drug discovery, development, and clinical trials stemming from the insights Genuity hopes to derive from this research," added Emory neurology Chairman Allan Levey. "Our collaboration with Genuity provides us with a potential opportunity to greatly accelerate our academic research efforts for the benefit of our patient population by including whole-genome sequence data to our cohort."
Genuity, formerly known as WuXi NextCode, offers contract genomics and artificial intelligence-driven data sourcing and data analytics services to the biopharmaceutical industry to support drug discovery and development. In October, the firm announced a collaboration with Ionis Pharmaceuticals to use genomics to develop new antisense therapeutics.