CHICAGO (GenomeWeb) – Hearst has invested $75 million in M2Gen, the health informatics subsidiary of Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, the media and health information company said today.
The money will support the expansion of the Oncology Research Information Exchange Network, which Moffitt, M2Gen, and Ohio State University created in 2014 to support data sharing among cancer centers, according to New York-based Hearst. ORIEN now connects 17 US institutions and other partners, including Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
"M2Gen's vast and growing database helps pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies accelerate discovery of new therapies by helping match cancer patients to clinical trials based on the unique molecular features in their disease," M2Gen Executive Chair William Dalton said in a statement. "Hearst's investment will be used to scale the patient database and accelerate the structuring of the data to facilitate clinical discoveries."
Richard Malloch, president of Hearst Business Media, framed the investment as a way to move the publishing empire deeper into precision medicine. "M2Gen's unique ability to pair a person’s clinical and genetic data for analysis puts it at the leading edge of genetics-based oncology research, and we are eager to extend Hearst Health's reach and make an important contribution to this new area of science," he said.