NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Five companies announced today that they have formed the UnDx Consortium in order to work together to produce new hypotheses for six patients struggling with undiagnosed diseases.
This precision medicine effort is made up of Delaware-based company Genome Profiling, which is providing epigenetic analysis; the lab of Rob Knight and the American Gut Project at the University of California, San Diego, who are providing microbiome analysis; Colorado company KromaTid, which is providing a chromosomal imaging platform for the detection of chromosomal rearrangements; Metabolon, which is providing metabolomics analysis; and Boston-based Orig3n, which is responsible for sample collection and stem cell analysis.
The consortium will be sponsored by Interome, a company founded by Harris & Harris Group during the first quarter of 2016, with the goal of developing a platform where genotypic, phenotypic, and physiological information are combined, focused on undiagnosed disease and elite athletic training.
The five partners will apply a multidisciplinary approach to precision medicine in order to show that it can be used to provide actionable information for patients with undiagnosed diseases. They will try to determine if contextual information provided by precision medicine technologies can be used in conjunction with genomic information to provide further medical hypotheses to these six people, with the aim of creating a model to help other undiagnosed patients.
"It has been 13 years since science mapped the human genome, but the promise of personalized medicine remains largely unfulfilled," Douglas Jamison, co-organizer of the UnDx Consortium and Chairman of Interome, said in a statement. "Genetics alone is not enough to provide the answers we need. We believe there may be opportunities by applying precision medicine technologies in a multidisciplinary approach that, combined with gene sequencing, will offer new insights on these difficult medical cases."