NEW YORK – Lifebit said Wednesday that it has won a three-year contract from healthcare data company PlumCare RWE to support the scale-up of a newborn genome sequencing screening program in Greece. Financial terms were not disclosed.
San Francisco-based PlumCare RWE has already partnered with the Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine to bring the screening program, called BeginNGS, to Greece. The nascent expansion to Europe — backed by PlumCare, Rady, and Greece's National Organization of Public Health — will sequence 1,000 babies this year, with the goal of reaching all newborns in the country by 2027.
BeginNGS, started at Rady in San Diego, aims to make rapid WGS a standard of care for newborns by implementing Genome-to-Treatment (GTRx), a virtual acute management guidance system to inform treatment of hundreds of hereditary pediatric diseases.
According to PlumCare RWE, Lifebit will help the startup connect data from the Greek program with global research cohorts. "With this, our researchers can gain crucial insights to better understand rare diseases and ultimately save lives," PlumCare CEO Petros Tsipouras said in a statement.
"We believe all biomedical data that can be used to save lives should be used," Lifebit CEO Maria Chatzou Dunford added. "By enabling secure data analysis, our technology will help to deliver life-saving breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases."