Guardian Research Network (GRN) and ThinkGenetic have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate the diagnosis and support the development of treatment options for patients with rare and genetic diseases. The collaboration leverages GNR’s healthcare data science and clinical expertise with ThinkGenetic’s experience in the development of electronic health record (EHR) algorithms for accurate diagnosis and give healthcare providers support.
“Working with ThinkGenetic is a great step forward for GRN’s mission of bringing the best care to historically-underserved patients while accelerating cures for disease, including rare diseases in cancer and non-cancer,” said Mark Watson, chief operating officer for GRN.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) says there are approximately 7,000 rare diseases affecting between 25 and 30 million American patients today and more than 80% of rare diseases have a known monogenic (single-gene) cause. Investment in rare diseases has gone up considerably in recent years.
According to the announcement, the GRN and ThinkGenetic collaboration will take on three challenges facing patients with rare genetic conditions:
- Accelerating identification and diagnosis of individuals at an increased risk to be affected by an underlying genetic condition
- Providing targeted education and decision support tools to healthcare providers who have patients at an increased risk of an underlying rare genetic condition
- Affording access to patients for clinical trials and Real World Data (RWD) research cohorts in collaboration with life science companies
The partnership combines ThinkGenetic’s “clinical understanding of rare genetic disease diagnosis and novel EHR-based algorithms” with GRN’s “national-scale RWD analytics platform that works in concert with its clinical trial operations.” This single-source research platform, the groups say, provides previously unavailable large, highly annotated cohorts of rare genetic disease subjects.
Read the rest of Rasi Bhadramani’s article for Inside Precision Medicine here.