NEW YORK – Biomedical informatics vendor Syntegra said Tuesday that it is collaborating with Nashville Biosciences in an attempt to accelerate drug discovery and development.
San Francisco-based Syntegra, maker of a machine-learning platform called Syntegra Medical Mind, will work with Vanderbilt University Medical Center subsidiary Nashville Biosciences to produce synthetic populations using data from VUMC's BioVU biorepository. They initially will attempt to utilize the synthetic data to recreate a recent study comparing the performance of different treatments for type 2 diabetes.
"The Syntegra Medical Mind works by extracting patterns of care within real data, and then creating a complete replica dataset," Syntegra Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Ofer Mendelevitch said in a statement.
Syntegra Cofounder and CEO Michael Lesh explained that working with synthetic data removes the privacy risk associated with using real-world data. "Synthetic data will unlock opportunities to dramatically accelerate how life-saving treatments reach patients," he said.
Nashville Biosciences, sometimes called NashBio, was spun out of Vanderbilt in 2018 to offer services and technology to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries based on data from BioVU, a biobank containing millions of longitudinal medical records with hundreds of thousands of linked genetic samples.
"We are constantly looking for innovative new tools and approaches that we can deploy against our clients' R&D problems," said Leeland Ekstrom, COO and cofounder of Nashville Biosciences. "The Syntegra Medical Mind is an analytic approach that does exactly that, and we are excited to test it in this specific application."