WashU Medicine, BJC HealthCare Help Launch Startup Focused on Real World Data
St. Louis-based Washington University School of Medicine and BJC HealthCare are partnering with CuriMeta, a new company focused on curating real-world data sets in the fight against chronic and acute diseases.
WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare said they are engaging in this venture to bring sophisticated data sets in support of research that seeks to predict, prevent and cure a broad variety of diseases.
CuriMeta specializes in managing “real-world” data collections, which hold promise in terms of making research faster and more efficient. For example, the analysis of large amounts of de-identified data from patients with neurodegenerative diseases could help researchers more accurately predict a timeline for symptom progression and aid the design of clinical trials that investigate earlier interventions for those individuals.
CuriMeta will create a secure platform to share such real-world data sets with life science companies whose research goals align with those of WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare, while ensuring that patients’ identities are kept private at every step in the process, the healthcare organizations said.
As part of their collaboration, WashU Medicine, BJC HealthCare and CuriMeta will jointly select appropriate projects and collaborators. A major emphasis for CuriMeta will be engaging with life science collaborators focused on identifying new insights into cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases and other neurological conditions, as well as rare diseases and childhood illnesses – all clinical strengths at WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare.
The collaborations will draw upon WashU Medicine’s expertise in developing advanced methods to protect patient privacy, including the use of artificial intelligence to create “synthetic data” sets, to ensure data shared by CuriMeta will be both high quality and meet current guidelines for safe and private health-data sharing.
“With comprehensive, de-identified or synthetic data, it becomes possible to rapidly identify new diagnostic and treatment strategies that may work well for a given disease,” said Philip Payne, Ph.D., the Janet and Bernard Becker Professor, chief data scientist and director of the Institute for Informatics at WashU Medicine, in a statement. “For example, such data can help find new uses for existing drugs, and those therapies can be delivered to market quickly and more cost efficiently, complementing our existing strengths in drug discovery and clinical research, and in turn, providing more options to maintain health and treat disease.”
“This company represents a new venture that is part of our distinguished role as a science-driven academic health system, leveraging our research capabilities to continually and exhaustively pursue ways to improve the health of our communities,” said David H. Perlmutter, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean of WashU Medicine, and the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Distinguished Professor, in a statement. “We will assist CuriMeta in identifying and vetting research opportunities with appropriate life science companies. Few healthcare institutions have the breadth and depth of clinical research resources of WashU Medicine and BJC to bring about this kind of big data endeavor.”
"We are investing significantly in augmenting and improving the usefulness of the data, not just gathering it," said Davis Walp, CuriMeta founder and CEO, in a statement. "Our data experts will curate, harmonize, and apply machine learning techniques to enhance the quality, completeness, and research value of our collaborators' data. This is a team of mission focused industry veterans who understand the pressing scientific and clinical challenges that researchers are solving for. We're aggregating and delivering advanced, real-world health data designed to answer those questions and address those needs."
Prior to founding CuriMeta, Walp was an executive at Decision Resources Group (now part of Clarivate), a global products and professional services business focused on providing health analytics, insights, and consulting services. He also has held leadership roles at Veradigm, Allscripts, and ConvergeHealth by Deloitte. Walp also spent over a decade at Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline in strategic marketing, new product planning, and corporate development roles.
Minority investors in CuriMeta include Cultivation Capital Healthcare Innovation Fund.
