Washington U. School of Medicine Is First Member of Unified Patient Network
Boston-based Seven Bridges Genomics has formed a subsidiary called the Unified Patient Network (UPN) to facilitate clinical research and collaboration between health systems and biopharma companies with a focus on advancing precision medicine.
The UPN is expected to operate as a collaborative group of nonprofit academic health centers and other health systems participating in clinical research enabled by the UPN through biopharma funding. The initiative aims to build a large database of research participants’ de-identified clinical and genomic data that will be available for research purposes – by researchers at UPN member health systems and biopharma companies.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and its affiliated health system, BJC HealthCare, is the first academic health system to join the UPN as a founding member. The network will expand to include other health systems and consented research participants from those institutions, Seven Bridges said in a press release.
“Washington University has a long-standing commitment to advance precision medicine and bring more personalized treatments to our patients,” said David H. Perlmutter, M.D., Executive Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean, and the Spencer T. and Ann. W. Olin Distinguished Professor at the School of Medicine, in a statement. “The UPN will be an important part of making this a reality by providing a platform to aggregate clinical and genomic data from research participants and share de-identified data with researchers. The UPN strategy takes another important step in positioning our communities for a new era of precision medicine, with more personalized diagnoses and treatments across many diseases.”
In a statement, William Moss, CEO of Seven Bridges and the UPN, explained that the effort aims to accelerate the scientific advancement and clinical implementation of precision medicine, in a manner that provides truly unprecedented return-of-value to its health system members and their research participants, via clinical whole genome sequencing, genetic screening, genetic counseling, research tools, data assets, collaborative interoperability and a significant incremental funding stream, at no charge to the health systems or patients. “With the ability to extend invitations to participate to patients across multiple health systems, UPN will be able to provide biopharma researchers unprecedented access to highly harmonized de-identified whole genome and longitudinal EHR data regarding highly specific cohorts drawn from thousands of research participants,” he added.
The network will begin by aggregating very specific cohorts, measured on the order of thousands of research participants. Ultimately, the UPN’s goal is to include over five million sequenced patient volunteers in its active network.
The UPN will operate across many disease states and therapeutic areas, including rare, complex neurodegenerative, psychiatric and autoimmune diseases and disorders, as well as cancer, cardiology and common diseases such as diabetes.
With the launch of the UPN, Seven Bridges named David Ledbetter, Ph.D., its Chief Clinical and Research Officer. Ledbetter was previously executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, where he was the principal investigator for the MyCode biobank and precision health program that exceeded 175,000 patients with exome sequence data linked to rich, longitudinal EHR and other clinical data.
“Previous experience from large population genomics projects have shown that healthcare data combined with genomics data can rapidly accelerate knowledge to help prevent disease or to improve patient outcomes, as well as identify new drug targets for biopharma pipelines,” Ledbetter said in a statement. “Until now, these valuable data sets have been confined to single health systems rather than aggregated and shared across multiple health systems, or have been siloed by individual commercial entities. The Unified Patient Network will unlock the long-promised benefits of our national investments in health IT and population scale genomics. This unique multi-sided network will bring these stakeholders together with the aim of advancing precision medicine through a genomics-enabled learning health system, whereby patients can have their genomes sequenced free of charge, giving researchers greater insights into patient health risks, and biopharmaceutical companies to more easily identify cohorts of patients as part of drug discovery efforts, thereby lowering everyone’s costs.”
“By bringing health systems together, we can enroll more patients into UPN studies, helping to speed innovative research while also protecting patients’ identities and confidentiality. Genome sequencing is expensive and out of reach for most patients, but the UPN is providing such sequencing to research volunteers free of charge,” explained Phillip Payne, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Health Information and Data Science and Chief Data Scientist at Washington University School of Medicine, in a statement. “This opens up the technology to many more people, including those in under-resourced communities, and is a huge win from an access and affordability standpoint.”
The UPN will receive funding from biopharma companies that request access to research participants’ de-identified genomic and health information for the companies’ own research. A portion of that funding will be returned to the health systems in the UPN, Payne said, to support efforts to improve their patients’ access to medical care and drive the institutions’ research and teaching missions.
The UPN has assembled partners and supporters, including Seven Bridges, Genome Medical, Amazon Web Services, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Illumina and others.
