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PrecisionLife offers support to COVID-19 coronavirus research community

Written by PrecisionLife | Apr 6, 2020 12:11:00 PM

Oxford, UK – PrecisionLife has confirmed it is extending its relationships with some of the largest COVID-19 collaborative research projects and is now offering free use of its unique analytics platform and support from its data and biomedical science teams to the on-going collaborative efforts of the medical research community in the fight against COVID-19 coronavirus.

The PrecisionLife platform can analyze large scale, complex multi-omic and epidemiological data to generate disease insights that are not possible with current tools. It is routinely used to analyze very large anonymized patient datasets (>100,000 patients) and with detailed insights into complex diseases returned within hours.

The platform can be used to help:

  • Identify the complex genetic factors associated with patients’ different disease severity and outcomes
  • Understanding risk factors such as smoking, gender, ethnicity, blood group and underlying health conditions
  • Developing tests to identify whether people are at high- / low-risk for serious forms of the disease
  • Informing the hunt for existing drugs that will be effective for given patient sub-groups, especially those at risk of late-stage disease
  • Identification of novel drugs targets especially for more serious late-stage disease

To be effective, the PrecisionLife tools require data from a minimum of several hundred COVID-19 patients, ideally including genotype/whole genome sequence with additional data including disease severity, co-morbidities, and epidemiological/phenotype information such as blood group, smoking, gender, ethnicity etc. The methods work hypothesis-free and do not require training.

The PrecisionLife platform has been validated on over 20 complex disease studies and with disease specialists, development partners and in pre-clinical assays/models. Several of these studies have focused on respiratory and immune response/auto-immune diseases.

PrecisionLife believes that its tools will be particularly helpful in analyzing the COVID-19 patient datasets currently being generated, and would welcome approaches from relevant parties, both in the UK and further afield.

For more information, please contact covid-19@precisionlife.com.