NEW YORK – Seqster said today that it has signed a three-year licensing agreement and entered into a partnership with the La Jolla (California) Institute of Immunology to support a federally funded asthma study. The San Diego-based company is providing the institute with a portal for sharing genotype-phenotype data as the research organization builds one of 10 PreCISE Network clinical centers nationwide.
The Precision Interventions for Severe and/or Exacerbation-Prone Asthma (PreCISE) network is a $6.9 million study funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to identify more effective and personalized treatments for asthma.
The Seqster Research Portal product will give the La Jolla Institute of Immunology an online home for connecting patients, clinicians, and researchers and help aggregate medical records, molecular test results, and data from medical devices, according to the company.
"We needed a scalable and robust platform that supports rapid person-centric data aggregation as well as real-time collection of longitudinal health records data to build this important and ambitious research cohort," Stephen Wilson, the institute's executive vice president and chief operating officer, said in a statement. "The Seqster research portal is the only platform that will allow our PrecISE study participants to instantly collect and share medical records, genomic, and device data with our researchers from anywhere in the country in a secure and transparent way while maintaining data ownership."
Seqster CEO and Cofounder Ardy Arianpour said that the partnership offers "further validation" of his company's technology. "It is exciting that our SRP platform is providing the technology backbone for such an innovative clinical study infrastructure that will yield important efficacy and safety data on novel asthma interventions," he said.
Seqster launched its platform a year ago. Notably, the company also has a partnership with the La Jolla-based Scripps Research Translational Institute to engage patients deemed to be at risk for polygenic coronary artery disease.