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Agreement grants access to patient genotypes and clinical data curated by Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi’s Group based at King’s College London
Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association supports new analysis of patient data to bring cutting edge analysis tools to improve understanding of disease
Enables PrecisionLife to establish precision neuroscience R&D partnerships to advance new patient stratification biomarkers, diagnostics and treatment approaches
Oxford and London, UK, 25 April 2023 – The techbio company PrecisionLife announces it has agreed a data access and licensing agreement with King’s College London to enable it to generate and commercialize novel insights into Motor Neurone Disease (MND) - also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and Lou Gehrig's Disease. The agreement will enable the Oxford-based company to identify new MND biomarkers and attract investment and partners to enable the development of new treatments and diagnostic tools.
PrecisionLife uses a powerful combinatorial analytics platform to analyze data from large disease populations, generating a much deeper understanding of complex diseases like MND than is possible by other methods.
MND is a complex disease with variations in symptoms, rate of progression, risk factors, and the biological drivers of disease. The platform is able to stratify patients, i.e. it categorizes MND patient populations into subgroups that have similar causes and drivers of disease, offering new hope for the development of precision medicine therapies matched to patient needs.
PrecisionLife has previously used its platform to identify 33 new genes associated with increased risk for MND as well as patient stratification biomarkers (PSBs) distinguishing patient subgroups that may respond to targeted treatment approaches. These findings can be applied to the validation of novel drug targets, identification of drug repurposing opportunities, the development of better diagnostic tools, and the selective recruitment of patients into clinical trials who are most likely to respond to new medicines – improving their probability of success.
PrecisionLife has also undertaken retrospective analysis of Phase III clinical trial data in CNS disorders to identify biomarkers of drug response, with the aim of supporting drug developers and regulators with compelling evidence of therapeutic benefit in specific patient groups within a previously unstratified trial population.
The MND Collections is an MND Association funded resource curated by the MND Association and Professor Al-Chalabi’s group working in collaboration with academic clinicians at the universities of Birmingham and Sheffield. The collections rely on more than 3,000 blood samples and clinical information from MND patients and healthy donors, collected between 2003 and 2012.
King’s College London has provided access to the patient data at the request of MND Association and in collaboration with Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi, Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London. Sample donor confidentiality is assured by anonymization of all data and PrecisionLife’s adherence to the highest ISO27001 and ISO27701 data security and privacy standards.
Dr Steve Gardner, CEO, PrecisionLife: “PrecisionLife is grateful for the support and collaboration of Professor Al-Chalabi and the MND Association in enabling us to access the MND Collections data, and is grateful to all participants, donors and their families and carers, without whom this invaluable research resource would not exist. We’re committed to finding better, more personalised ways of diagnosing, and treating patients and the new data access agreement will help accelerate our progress.”
Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi, Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics, King’s College London: “Research is at it's most effective when there is active collaboration in the pursuit of a common goal. This agreement speaks to the momentum that MND research is experiencing and I am excited about its potential to bring new developments in this field.”
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PrecisionLife is a pioneering techbio company changing the way we predict, prevent, and treat chronic diseases. Our combinatorial analytics platform identifies mechanistic patient stratification biomarkers and novel drug targets associated with clinically relevant patient subgroups.
Our patient stratification biomarkers can be used to design smaller, faster, more targeted clinical trials with a greater probability of success, enabling quicker progress towards better treatments for patients. We also analyze clinical trial results to identify biomarkers associated with patients’ drug response, enabling companies to understand efficacy results and get more drugs successfully to market with biomarkers supporting their prescription to the patients who will benefit from them.
Having generated deep insights in over 45 chronic diseases, PrecisionLife has developed an in-house pipeline of novel early-stage drug targets and precision repositioning assets with patient stratification biomarkers for co-development with biopharma partners.
This deeper understanding of disease biology powers PrecisionLife's innovation engine of patient-focused drug discovery, derisked clinical trials, and precision medicine diagnostics, to deliver a new age of better, more personalized therapy options – improving health, for everyone.
For more information, please visit www.precisionlife.com
LinkedIn: @PrecisionLife | Twitter: @PrecisionLifeAI
King's College London is one of the top 35 universities in the world and one of the top 10 in Europe (QS World University Rankings, 2021/22) and among the oldest in England. King's has more than 33,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from over 150 countries worldwide, and 8,500 staff. King's has an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research.
The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s is a leading centre for mental health and neuroscience research in Europe. It produces more highly cited outputs (top 1% citations) on psychiatry and mental health than any other centre (SciVal 2021), and on this metric has risen from 16th (2014) to 4th (2021) in the world for highly cited neuroscience outputs. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), 90% of research at the IoPPN was deemed ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (3* and 4*). World-leading research from the IoPPN has made, and continues to make, an impact on how we understand, prevent and treat mental illness, neurological conditions, and other conditions that affect the brain.
www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn | Follow @KingsIoPPN on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn