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Recombinant Supporting VA's Genomics Project with Informatics System

By a GenomeWeb staff reporter

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Recombinant Data of Newton, Mass., is working with the US Department of Veterans Affairs to provide management tools for the genomic and healthcare data generated by the VA's Million Veterans Program, the company said today.

The firm is helping the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC) develop an informatics platform called the Genomic Informatics System for Integrative Science (GenISIS) that will integrate a range of healthcare and experimental data.

GeneISIS will serve as the informatics basis for the MVP, a recently-expanded program that will recruit one million veterans to provide DNA samples and other detailed health information from the VA's records to identify genes and environmental factors that are related to health and disease.

The MVP project launched in one VA hospital in January of this year, and earlier this month it began its national expansion.

Recombinant has collaborated with MAVERIC to create a system to integrate recruitment and enrollment data in the VA's Veterans Health Information System and Technology Infrastructure, the agency's electronic medical records system. The collaborators already have created a system for collecting and managing patients' consent and questionnaire data and for tracking samples.

Now, as the MVP is scaling up, Recombinant will work with MAVERIC to expand it to include the warehousing of genomic and clinical data, genomic analysis, biorepository management, hypothesis testing tools, and other applications. These efforts are expected to be completed later in 2011 and 2012, the company said.

"GenISIS is a beacon project that many other healthcare providers are looking to emulate, as it will establish a model for secure and efficient analysis of consented genotypic data to move towards the promise of genomics to deliver personalized medicine," Recombinant CEO Peter Emerson said in a statement.