NEW YORK (360Dx) – Nightingale Health said on Monday that it will analyze biomarker profiles in the blood samples of 150,000 participants in a Mexico City Prospective Study being conducted to track diseases in a Hispanic population.
Nightingale said that as part of the study, it will perform large-scale metabolic profiling under a contract with the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford in the UK.
Until recently, technological constraints and prohibitive costs have prevented the analysis of comprehensive biomarker data from large-scale population collections, the firm said.
The firm's profiling technology measures metabolic biomarkers that recent studies have found to be predictive of future risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other common chronic diseases. It measures more than 220 metabolic biomarkers from a single blood sample.
Nightingale anticipates completing its analysis within 12 months, enabling researchers to start investigating the dataset.
"Biomarker profiling will allow us to better understand how lifestyle, environment, and genetics combine to cause diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, in a population with high levels of obesity and diabetes," Jonathan Emberson, associate professor of medical statistics and epidemiology in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, said in a statement.
Teemu Suna, CEO and founder of Nightingale Health, said that the firm's analysis of metabolic profiles from the cohort "will facilitate the evaluation of effective prevention strategies and treatments for the local population."
In June, the firm announced it would be analyzing the biomarker profiles of 500,000 blood samples from the UK Biobank to facilitate global medical research. The project is expected to last 30 months.