Longenesis announces Curator platform for privacy-preserving data use for COVID-19 research
Longenesis announces Curator platform for privacy-preserving data use for COVID-19 research
Longenesis announces the first deployment of its flagship product Curator for real-time, privacy-preserving biomedical data identification, with the National Research Programme in Latvia for COVID-19 research acceleration and Federated Learning pipeline
Longenesis - a digital health startup aiming towards the acceleration of the biomedical research pipeline worldwide, announced a release of its product Curator. It is a platform where clinical institutions and patient organizations are connected in consortiums with potential collaboration partners and study sponsors to initiate further cooperation. The main difference between existing solutions - ability to showcase available personalized datasets without compromising privacy.
Curator provides an opportunity to search for specific biomedical data by different combinations of descriptive characteristics without revealing personal data. It means that actual data sets are left within the institution. However, Curator notifies the data custodian that researchers or institutions are interested in contacting patients or using a particular dataset. This approach provides data controlling mechanisms to the data publishing institutions and the patients. Thus, Curator provides an opportunity for clinical investigators, patient organisations, registries, biobanks, and other institutions to showcase the scope of data that could be used for research without compromising the privacy of patients and data protection regulations.
"The majority of solutions aimed to address the similar challenges are providing a centralized approach towards data storing and structuring, powered by the ingestion of data from multiple centers. Such approaches limit the ability to utilize the hidden value of personalized data for scientific breakthroughs while preserving privacy and ethical aspects in the first place. Pandemic just amplified previously described problems and highlighted the necessity to find solutions for fragmented data as well as initiate collaboration. SARS-CoV-2 accelerated the need for data changing pace from monthly to daily. Moreover, to quickly act and find the treatment, data has to be in-sync not only in one institution but also providing real-time identification among multiple centers in various geographies. Thus, with a centralized approach for metadata curation, Longenesis becomes an essential tool at the forefront of biomedical international research," says Emil Syundyukov, Longenesis Chief Technical Officer.
Currently, the company Longenesis has already initiated a collaboration with 20+ clinical institutions, as well as patient organizations, biobanks, genomic sequencers, and digital health startups in the U.S., South Korea, Northern, and Central European region, and the Middle East, utilizing the platform for COVID-19, metabolic disorder and oncology research. One of the strategic projects to mention is a collaboration with the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre (BMC), University of Latvia, Riga Stradins University, and Riga Technical University. The aim of the cooperation is to use a solution to accelerate COVID-19 research and engagement with international scientific groups. Within the framework of the National Research program to Mitigate Consequences of COVID-19, National Biobank of Latvia - Genome Database of Latvia maintained by BMC has established a cohort of over 500 COVID-19 patients. Latvian COVID-19 cohort includes various types of samples (blood, serum, plasma, oropharyngeal swabs, PBMC, feces, urine, isolated DNA, RNA), molecular data (blood biochemistry, cytokine panel, genome-wide genotyping, viral genome data, metagenome, metabolome, and transcriptome data) as well as excessive characterization of each clinical case. Being also engaged in utilization of COVIDomic platform, developed by Insilico Medicine, providing multi-omics analysis and patient stratification and severity prognosis, such approach would dramatically accelerate the process of international collaborations and new discoveries in COVID-19 space. "The platform will significantly impact infrastructure development and acquire many new competencies in Latvia that reaches far outside the COVID-19 research frame. The COVID-19 data set is the most evaluated and data-rich disease cohort in Latvia. The development of such an integrated platform is a large step towards implementing personalized preventive medicine in the nearest future," says prof. Janis Klovins, director of Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre (BMC). The Curator platform has enabled the safe sharing of this significant research resource to a wider scientific audience. The platform has opened collaboration across distributed COVID-19 datasets keeping the link to biological samples that is a crucial factor for the management of world-wide COVID-19 pandemics.
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For press and other inquiries: +371 20201964 Emil Syundyukov es@longenesis.com
About Longenesis: Longenesis, co-founded by Insilico Medicine and other top-tier biotech players, is a medical technology startup company working towards providing a technological bridge between Healthcare institutions and the BioTech industry with an aim to help identify and unlock the hidden value of biomedical data to accelerate the novel drug and treatment discovery and provide better help to those of need. Our team has experience working with biomedical organizations and unlocking the potential for accelerating the R&D process around the globe, including National level projects in the Middle East, U.S., EU, and APAC regions.
About the National Research Programme of Latvia to Mitigate Consequences of COVID-19 (Project No. VPP-COVID-2020/1-0016) The main goal of this project is to create a well-managed, secure and centralized biobank and data exchange resource to support the activities that would limit the spread of the virus, search for novel biomarkers and treatment strategies, facilitate the establishment of new international collaborations. The project will be an important part of the overarching objective of the National Research Program for mitigation of the impact of COVID-19. The main concept behind this approach is to provide centralized service for scientific groups involved in COVID-19 research limiting the unnecessary overlapping of activities related to patient recruitment, data gathering, analytical tests.
About Insilico Medicine Insilico Medicine develops software that leverages generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques for the generation of new molecular structures with specific properties. Insilico Medicine also develops software for the generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and the prediction of clinical trials outcomes. The company integrates two business models; providing AI-powered drug discovery services and software through its Pharma.AI platform and developing its own pipeline of preclinical programs. The preclinical program is the result of pursuing novel drug targets and novel molecules discovered through its platforms. Since its inception in 2014, Insilico Medicine has raised over $52 million and received multiple industry awards. Insilico Medicine has also published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has applied for over 25 patents.