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Integrating the clinical lab workflow
June 2013
EDIT CONNECT
SHARING OPTIONS:
SAN FRANCISCO—Early May saw CollabRx Inc., a data analytics
company focused on informing the clinical interpretation of molecular
diagnostic testing, team up with Boston-based GeneInsight LLC, a developer of
software to support knowledge
management and reporting for genetic testing
laboratories. The goal: deliver a robust medical informatics solution to better
support the interpretation
and reporting of genetic variants from
sequencing-based tests.
The deal calls for CollabRx's
medical and scientific content
to be made accessible through the GeneInsight knowledge management platform,
and this effort is focused for now on
oncology. The solution is aimed at users
in clinical laboratories, to support their genetic sequencing, interpretation
and reporting needs.
"We are excited to work with GeneInsight to provide a key
medical informatics capability to the genetic testing
laboratory market to
accelerate adoption of next-generation sequencing-based tests for cancer and
beyond," said Thomas R. Mika, CollabRx chairman,
president and CEO, in the
official release about the deal. "Our partnership with GeneInsight goes a long
way towards enabling a truly integrated
clinical laboratory workflow."
Although he had worked with people at GeneInsight in the
past at other
institutions, CollabRx's head of business development and
alliances, Dr. Gavin J. Gordon, says the company really came onto the radar for
CollabRx in
a deal-making sense last September after the announcement of a deal
between GeneInsight and Illumina.
"They were making some commercial noise in
the marketplace,
and that opened up some interesting opportunities for collaboration," Gordon
tells DDNEWS. "In early February of this
year, we reached out to them and started talking about we could do some
partnership-type discussions."
They ended up closing on the deal officially in April, he
says.
"GeneInsight has developed some nice relationships with
leading academic-based sequencing centers as well as cancer-treatment centers
and hospitals,
and they've announced deals with Cedars-Sinai, Illumina and
others," Gordon continues. "The academic-based hospitals and sequencing centers
are among the earliest adopters of next-generation sequencing
technology,
especially clinically oriented tech, so it makes sense for us to reach that
market in as many different ways as we can. Hence, this deal.
"
GeneInsight has been in use since 2005 and has supported the
interpretation and reporting
workflow for more than 30,000 clinical genetic
tests across multiple diagnostic reference laboratories, the two companies
note, adding that organizing
and clinically interpreting genetic sequence data
is among the greatest challenges facing treating clinicians. It is potentially
overwhelming to
physicians, limiting their ability to use the data for actual
effective patient care, particularly when it comes to cancer.
The combined offering in oncology will enable clinical
laboratories to catalogue genetic variants from sequencing-
based tests, and
associate them with CollabRx's expertly curated knowledge on available drugs
and clinical trials, the companies explain. Laboratories
will have the option
to incorporate this information into reports for treating physicians to enable
increasingly informed treatment planning. Knowledge
management, reporting and
delivery of findings to ordering clinicians will be streamlined through Gene
Insight's networked infrastructure, providing
clinical laboratories the means
to update physicians as knowledge evolves so they can effectively manage
patient care.
"The CollabRx and GeneInsight collaboration will enable
laboratories using GeneInsight to leverage CollabRx content as they
draft
reports explaining the significance of variants identified in patients," said
Dr. Heidi Rehm, chief laboratory director at Partners HealthCare's Laboratory
for Molecular Medicine, in the news
release about the deal. "When it comes to
diagnosing and developing treatments, we work closely with scientists and
clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital
to advance patient care. We are thrilled to work with CollabRx
and its more
than 75 leading independent clinical practitioners to accelerate adoption of
clinical sequencing in cancer."
The collaboration is a perfect pairing, Gordon says, because
while the GeneInsight software platform allows people to handle
and share data,
it isn't actually populated with data. That's the part that CollabRx brings, so
that users can get a platform with data already in
place—at least for cancer—instead
of having to populate the platform with data themselves.
"From
mission, tactics and strength standpoint, we're very
much aligned with GeneInsight," Gordon states. "And from practical standpoint
we provide a
piece that they are lacking and they provide something we lack." Code: E061315 Back |
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