NEW YORK – Verana Health announced on Thursday a partnership with the Foundation Fighting Blindness to support clinical trials by combining genomic data with real-world evidence.
Under the partnership, the foundation will provide de-identified genomic data from its My Retina Tracker Registry, which will be integrated with patient-reported data from the American Academy of Ophthalmology's Intelligent Research in Sight (IRIS) Registry and Verana's VeraQ population health engine.
The combined data is expected to enhance clinical trial patient and site selection for health economics and outcomes research and medical affairs support, among other applications.
The Foundation Fighting Blindness has been supporting research into inherited retinal diseases for decades. It provides no-cost genetic testing to people with these conditions using a panel of 351 mutations known to be associated with retinal disease and stores the data in its registry.
Verana is the exclusive data curation and analytics partner for the Academy's IRIS Registry, which contains longitudinal patient data collected from over 16,000 clinicians.
"Genomics data is one of the critical new elements taking us to the next frontier in RWE," Lawrence Whittle, president of Verana Health, said in a statement. "With this partnership, we're now making it possible to not only identify the critical encounters and optimal opportunities for intervention in the ophthalmic patient journey but can now link those events to specific biomarkers that may hold clues to improved and more targeted therapies."