OXFORD, UK, May 12 2023 – PrecisionLife has been highly commended at the British Data Awards for the Data for Good Initiative of the Year at an awards ceremony in Central London.
As a leading techbio company we’re using our unique data analytics approach to extend precision medicine beyond oncology and rare diseases into chronic diseases that affect ∼75% of people in their lifetime1 and account for over 80% of healthcare spending2.
The insights we have generated into more than 45 complex chronic diseases are enabling the development of new precision medicines and more accurate diagnostic tools.
An example of this is in ME and chronic fatigue syndrome, a massively debilitating chronic disease affecting more than 17 million people who have a 100% unmet medical need. In more than 30 years of international research, very little was known about the disease until PrecisionLife researchers identified the underlying genetic causes and risk factors for different groups of patients.
Analyzing data from UK Biobank using PrecisionLife’s hypothesis-free combinatorial analytics platform, our study found 14 novel genetic associations that were significantly associated with 91% of cases in the ME/CFS population3.
These genes map to distinct patient subgroups each with unique sets of symptoms, underlying drivers of their disease, and treatment response, creating opportunities for precision medicine approaches to target subgroups of patients to treat the disease.
Several of these ME/CFS genes were also found in cases of long Covid and multiple sclerosis, helping to improve the biological understanding of all three diseases which will support the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools.
We are now in the process of analyzing long COVID-19 data to identify shared genes and biology underpinning ME/CFS and long COVID. Our early results have indicated that there is overlap between the two diseases. We plan to publish these findings for peer review in the coming months.
These ground-breaking insights offer hope to people living with ME/CFS and enable the development of more accurate diagnostic tools and personalized treatment options.
A full list of award categories and winners from the 2023 British Data Awards can be found HERE.
1 World Health Organization – Noncommunicable diseases factsheet https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases
2 Dieleman JL, Cao J, Chapin A, et al. US Health Care Spending by Payer and Health Condition, 1996-2016. JAMA. 2020;323(9):863–884
3 Das, S., Taylor, K., Kozubek, J. et al. Genetic risk factors for ME/CFS identified using combinatorial analysis. J Transl Med 20, 598 (2022).