NEW YORK – Genuity Science, formerly known as WuXi NextCode, said Tuesday that it has formed a strategic collaboration with Nashville Biosciences to apply analytics technology to a major clinicogenomic biobank for biomarker and drug discovery, as well as validation and drug development.
Nashville Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, offers services and technology to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries. It leans heavily on BioVU, Vanderbilt's bank of longitudinal medical records and DNA samples that now contains more than 250,000 specimens.
Under the agreement, Boston-based Genuity will sequence, analyze, and harmonize samples and deidentified clinical records in BioVU through its laboratory in Ireland and make the results available to its partners in the biopharma industry.
"The collaboration with Genuity Science allows us to maximize the impact of our biorepository to support research and accelerate drug discovery and development," NashBio COO Leeland Ekstrom said in a statement.
"Adding the bioresources and clinical data from Nashville Biosciences to Genuity Science's own clinical omics database will help create some of the largest disease datasets in the world," said Genuity COO Anne Jones. "The potential for drug discovery and development from these datasets combined with our existing, more homogenous Irish dataset is truly unmatched."
Genuity changed its name and identity in June as part of a restructuring that includes plans to divest its operations in China.