This week, personalized medicine consultancy firm Diaceutics and pharmacogenetics service provider London Genetics announced their plans to develop a software tool that can be used by biopharmaceutical companies to access and explore biomarker data and resources from academic research groups.
According to the partners, the new software will be based on Diaceutics' Fusion platform and London Genetics' Biomarker Pathway platform, and is expected to launch in 2011. The tool will enable biopharmaceutical companies to do things like build biomarker hypotheses and prepare proposals for clinical development.
Furthermore, companies requesting access to patient samples and data will be sent to a global network of academic teams involved in biomarker research, including London Genetics' network of more than 3,000 investigators. This way companies can identify and form partnerships with researchers in academia.
Peter Keeling, chief executive officer of Diaceutics, said his company is "delighted" to partner with London Genetics because together the companies can address what he describes as one of the key problems of therapy development.
“Biomarker research is often limited because teams don’t know the capabilities of external research centers and miss potential collaborations which could accelerate their targeted therapy development,” Keeling said.
Formed in 2007, London Genetics is a not-for-profit company that uses a pharmacogenetics approach to clinical drug discovery and development. Among other resources, the company gives its clients access to biomarker samples for genetic research, networks of clinical, genetic, and bioinformatics experts, and services for data interpretation and statistical analysis.
Diaceutics, which has offices in the US and UK, is an international management and consulting firm that provides services focused on personalized medicine.