NEW YORK – Metabolon on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Genomics England to advance rare disease diagnosis through metabolomic characterization of hundreds of such disorders.
The collaborators plan to generate metabolomic data for over 7,000 participants from the UK's 100,000 Genomes Project, a sequencing project launched in 2012 that was led by Genomics England and NHS England and focused on patients affected by rare disease or cancer.
Financial details of the collaboration were not disclosed.
Morrisville, North Carolina-based Metabolon, which raised some $25 million in private equity financing at the beginning of the year, has partnered with several other British institutions to characterize disease-related metabolic changes. Over the course of last year, the company forged separate partnerships with Parkinson's UK and with the University of Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre.
The firm also teamed up with King's College London to study the microbiomes of twins, in an effort to unravel relationships between the gut microbial community and human health.
"This partnership seeks to establish the clinical utility of metabolomics in precision medicine and demonstrate the value of metabolomics alongside genomics for profiling patients with complex rare phenotypes," Karl Bradshaw, Metabolon's chief business officer, said in a statement.
Genomics England CSO Matt Brown commented that since the organization's founding, technology has undergone "major advances," including the emergence of metabolomics. "We're now looking to expand our focus to bring together these different omics approaches to build the world's largest dataset with comprehensive multiomic profiling for rare disease," he said.