NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – BGI and Sanguine BioSciences have teamed up to develop a database that combines genomic and clinical patient data in order to improve enrollment in precision clinical trials.
For their first project, the partners are planning to make searchable whole-genome data and electronic medical records from more than 1,000 rheumatoid arthritis patients accessible to trial developers. This, they said, will allow drug developers to make their trial cohorts more homogeneous, which will reduce their risk and cost and increase their likelihood of success.
BGI will sequence the samples for the project on its BGISEQ platform, which the company said is the first time the platform is used in a large-scale profiling project in the biopharmaceutical space.
"Selecting the right patient cohort(s), and then recruiting swiftly are the ingredients of a successful clinical trial," said Timothy Triche, chairman of Sanguine's board of directors, in a statement. "Today, there is no other company that enables specific individual requests based on both whole-genome and EMR data, and then works directly with those identified patients to enroll them into the trial," he said.
"The partnership with Sanguine will allow precise and efficient clinical trial enrollment, and will enhance BGI's overall solution to its biopharma partners," said Charles Bao, general manager of BGI Americas, a subsidiary of BGI Genomics, in a statement.
Sanguine has developed a direct-to-patient data collection and commercialization platform that is currently used by more than 15,000 patients and at least 20 pharmaceutical companies.