Boston University has taken a 20 percent stake in Framingham Genomic Medicine, a new company that will sell analyses of data from the university’s Framingham Heart Study.
Framingham Genomic Medicine is planning to hire a team of geneticists, biostatisticians, epidemiologists and bioinformatics specialists, who will be able to turn the genetic, clinical, and behavioral data collected from 10,000 participants over 52 years into research-quality information.
“The gist of this is that there is a real bottleneck in genomics--the availability of research--quality data,” said Fred Ledley, chief scientific officer at Framingham Genomic Medicine, who left his post as president and CEO of Variagenics last August.
“We will be putting 50,000 genetic markers on the samples in order to be able to do cross-correlations. The key is to build the database systems that allow the analyses to be performed.”
The company intends to buy tools as well as develop its own products that could then be commercialized.