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“With comprehensive, de-identified or synthetic data, it becomes possible to rapidly identify new diagnostic and treatment strategies that may work well for a given disease,” Philip R. O. Payne, PhD, the Janet and Bernard Becker Professor, chief data scientist and director of the Institute for Informatics at WashU Medicine, said in a public statement.
“For example, such data can help find new uses for existing drugs, and those therapies can be delivered to market quickly and more cost-efficiently, complementing our existing strengths in drug discovery and clinical research, and in turn, providing more options to maintain health and treat disease,” Payne continued.
By exchanging real-world health data with the research community, CuriMeta intends to enable life science organizations to accelerate their research and bring new diagnostics and interventions to patients and their care providers.
CuriMeta's potential collaborators and partners include health systems and academic medical centers, life science manufacturers, and clinical research organizations, particularly those working in oncology, cardiology, and neurology.
“This company represents a new venture that is part of our distinguished role as a science-driven academic health system, leveraging our research capabilities to continually and exhaustively pursue ways to improve the health of our communities,” David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean of WashU Medicine, said in a separate press release.
“We will assist CuriMeta in identifying and vetting research opportunities with appropriate life science companies. Few health-care institutions have the breadth and depth of clinical research resources of WashU Medicine and BJC to bring about this kind of big data endeavor.”
CuriMeta's potential collaborators, jointly picked by WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare, include health systems, academic medical centers, life science manufacturers, and clinical research organizations. A particular focus will be placed on collaborating with life science organizations that are identifying new insights into cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and other neurological conditions, the press release stated.
To guarantee patient privacy, all health data will be aggregated and de-identified or synthesized, CuriMeta mentioned.
The collaborations will make use of WashU Medicine’s knowledge in developing advanced methods to protect patient privacy. For example, this will include using artificial intelligence (AI) to create “synthetic data” sets. Therefore, data shared by CuriMeta will be both high quality and meet current guidelines for safe and private health data sharing.
"Increasingly complex therapies require deeper evidence and the demonstration of higher levels of clinical value and impact in order to receive acceptance and adoption by providers and patients, as well as regulatory approval—and it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to access the data necessary to prove such value," said Darren Brodeur, CuriMeta's chief commercial officer. "CuriMeta will help address this problem by providing the types of comprehensive, secure, and high-quality health data to researchers in order to ultimately prove the safety, efficacy, and clinical value of new or existing diagnostics and treatments."
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