OXFORD, UK and PORTLAND, ME – 25 November 2025 – Ovation.io, a leading human omics and clinical data company, and PrecisionLife, a precision medicine company transforming how complex chronic diseases are understood and managed, today announced a collaboration to develop drug-response biomarkers for glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1) therapies. The resulting insights will potentially underpin a payor-facing test to inform reimbursement policy for these widely prescribed drugs based on a patient’s potential to tolerate and respond to a drug in specific indications.
The partnership combines Ovation’s longitudinal multiomic data from 25,000 US patients treated with GLP-1 therapies, and PrecisionLife’s AI-driven combinatorial analytics platform, uniquely capable of revealing the drivers of disease and identifying the patients most likely to respond to specific therapies.
The first of its kind initiative will uncover the biological mechanisms that determine individual variation in response to GLP-1s and find biomarkers associated with their safety, efficacy, and tolerability. The goal is to help payors and providers achieve the best, most cost-effective outcomes for patients using GLP-1s – reducing clinical waste, improving access, and sustaining healthcare budgets as demand continues to rise. The tools will also help biopharma companies launch new GLP-1 products in indications that are not currently reimbursed.
GLP-1s represent one of the fastest-growing therapeutic classes globally, driving a USD $95 billion obesity market by 2030 (Goldman Sachs Research, 2025). In the United States alone, it is estimated that between 30 and 70 million prescriptions for GLP-1s will be written annually by the end of the decade. However, their high cost and soaring demand pose a major challenge for payors. The drugs are not equally safe, effective or tolerable for all patients (Ghusn, et al, 2024), and large-scale prescribing without understanding likely response can lead to unsustainable budget pressures that crowd out other essential health services.
“This proof-of-concept project will enable a more sustainable approach to the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and demonstrate our abilities to provide solutions in high value disease states where precision medicine and therapy selection address unmet needs,” said Curt Medeiros, Chief Executive Officer of Ovation.io. “By combining Ovation’s best-in-class longitudinal omics and clinical data generation capabilities with PrecisionLife’s world-leading analytics, we aim to build the real-world evidence needed to guide payors toward smarter reimbursement policies that improve patient outcomes while controlling cost. Importantly, our biobank, which is representative of both sex and ethnicity in the US, is scaling in complex, chronic diseases at unprecedented speed.”
By identifying drug-response biomarkers that predict efficacy, safety, and tolerability, PrecisionLife and Ovation will enable the development of a Mechanostic® test that can help payors and publicly funded healthcare systems determine where GLP-1 therapies are most clinically and economically justified. This mechanism-based approach will make it possible to structure value-based reimbursement frameworks, where costs are aligned to real-world benefit and patient outcomes.
Steve Gardner, Chief Executive Officer of PrecisionLife, added: “This is our first collaboration with Ovation, giving us access to world-class multiomic and clinical data to expand our proven capability in identifying drug-response biomarkers beyond clinical trials and into real-world healthcare. GLP-1s present both a tremendous preventative health opportunity across multiple indications and a major challenge for health systems and payors. By understanding why some patients respond well and others do not, we can enable payors to make more informed, sustainable coverage decisions, help pharma bring new products to market, and ultimately deliver better value for patients, providers, and the industry.”
Importantly, as GLP-1 therapies move into secondary indications such as cardiovascular, kidney, liver, and neurological diseases, the ability to predict drug response becomes ever more valuable. Understanding where these therapies work best will optimize resource allocation and help expand appropriate use of GLP-1s across multiple therapeutic areas – supporting both payors’ cost sustainability and prevention value proposition as well as underpinning pharma’s market growth in an increasingly competitive market.
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1. What is the purpose of this collaboration between PrecisionLife and Ovation?
PrecisionLife and Ovation are partnering to identify biomarkers that predict individual patients’ safety, efficacy and tolerability responses to GLP-1 receptor agonists. The findings will support the development of a payor-facing Mechanostic test designed to help health plans reimburse GLP-1 drugs more sustainably and with greater clinical precision.
2. Why is this work needed now?
Demand for GLP-1s is accelerating rapidly, with up to 70 million US prescriptions forecast annually by 2030. Their high cost, combined with growing off-label and obesity-related use, is creating significant financial pressure for payors. Many patients do not benefit from or cannot tolerate the drugs and therefore do not realize long-lasting health benefits. In response, many health plans have already begun restricting coverage, particularly for indications outside type 2 diabetes, or have imposed prior authorization hurdles, or exclusion policies to manage budget impact. These constraints risk limiting access to the drugs for patients who could benefit from them, creating inequities, and pushing costs into other parts of the system.
3. How will the resulting test help payors manage GLP-1 reimbursement?
This collaboration aims to provide payors with the real-world evidence and biomarker insights needed to move away from broad utilization controls toward precision-guided reimbursement that improves outcomes while protecting affordability and patient access.
The mechanism-based test will identify which patients are most likely to respond well - and tolerate - a specific GLP-1 therapy. This will allow payors to prioritize coverage where clinical and economic value is highest, reduce clinical waste, and enable value-based reimbursement models aligned to real-world benefit.
4. When will the research be completed, and when could a test be available?
This collaboration is a proof-of-concept program leveraging Ovation’s existing longitudinal dataset and PrecisionLife’s AI-led combinatorial analytics platform. The biomarker discovery work begins immediately with results expected in Q1 2026. The availability of a clinical Mechanostic test will depend on validation, regulatory pathways, and engagement with payors and provider groups. The partners expect to progress rapidly toward a validated product once the biomarkers are identified.
5. What regulatory pathway would the Mechanostic test follow?
The initial readout would be developed as a laboratory-developed test (LDT) in alignment with CLIA-certified laboratory requirements. PrecisionLife’s approach is designed for compatibility with standard test platforms and US regulatory pathways for predictive biomarker tests, with scope for future FDA engagement depending on use cases (for example, companion diagnostic alignment or clinical decision support).
6. Will the test work across different GLP-1 drugs and formulations?
Yes. The collaboration analyses 25,000 real-world patients treated with multiple GLP-1 therapies, and aims to discover biomarkers that are therapy and symptom specific where sufficient predictive power can be reached. The ultimate objective is to guide treatment selection for individual patients, whether they are prescribed semaglutide, liraglutide, tirzepatide, or other emerging agents.
7. How does PrecisionLife’s technology differ from existing attempts to repurpose GLP-1s for other diseases?
Past efforts to expand GLP-1s into new indications - such as the semaglutide Alzheimer’s trial - largely targeted broad patient groups defined by clinical symptoms or diagnostic labels. These approaches do not account for the fact that complex chronic diseases are driven by multiple distinct biological mechanisms, only some of which may respond to GLP-1 pathways.
PrecisionLife’s platform applies mechanistic patient stratification, identifying the specific combinations of genetic and biological drivers that create different subgroups within a disease. This reveals which subpopulations are most likely to be responsive to GLP-1s and which are not, and which have the highest likelihood of specific adverse events. By matching therapies to the biological mechanisms active in each subgroup - rather than treating all patients as a homogeneous population - PrecisionLife enables far more targeted, de-risked development in secondary indications.
This stratified approach avoids the one-size-fits-all assumptions that have constrained past repurposing attempts and provides a clearer, evidence-led path to expanding GLP-1 use where it is biologically justified.
8. How representative is the dataset underlying this work?
Ovation’s GLP-1 biobank is representative of US sex, age and ancestry diversity and includes longitudinal multiomic and clinical data from 25,000 real-world patients. This scale and diversity help ensure that resulting insights will be generalizable across US health plan populations.
9. How will this test support provider and health system operations?
By predicting which patients will benefit most from a GLP-1, the test can reduce trial-and-error prescribing, shorten time to effective therapy, avoid unnecessary adverse side effects, decrease non-adherence from early intolerance, and support more efficient clinical workflows. For health systems facing pressure from rising GLP-1 demand, this provides a mechanism to allocate resources and capacity more effectively.
10. Will this test limit patient access to GLP-1 medications?
No. The intention is to expand access by enabling more sustainable reimbursement models. Payors can invest confidently when they know who will benefit most, and providers can prescribe more effectively with evidence-backed insights. Over time, this supports broader adoption while protecting health system budgets.
PrecisionLife is a precision medicine company transforming how we predict, treat, and prevent complex chronic diseases. Using its proprietary AI-driven combinatorial analytics platform, PrecisionLife uncovers the biological drivers of disease at unmatched scale and resolution - personalizing risk prediction, accelerating diagnosis, and optimizing treatment decisions.
Our unique ability to stratify patients by underlying disease mechanisms supports a broad range of solutions, including diagnostic and prognostic testing, differential triage, treatment optimization, clinical trial enrichment, and drug repurposing.
PrecisionLife partners with healthcare providers, payors and biopharma innovators to deliver clinically actionable insights that improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and extend healthy lifespan for billions of people affected by chronic disease.
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Ovation is a genomic data company committed to unlocking the potential of human genomic data at scale and accelerating precision medicine development. By providing access to high-quality genomic data linked to rich, longitudinal phenotypic data at scale, Ovation allows life sciences researchers to advance drug discovery and development more efficiently. Ovation’s cloud-based LIMS and Ovation Research Network, enable a diverse network of clinical laboratories to quickly adopt innovative molecular tests while biobanking and transforming samples to be used for research.
For more information about Ovation, visit http://www.ovation.io