NEW YORK – UK bioinformatics firm PrecisionLife and Utah-based specialty healthcare firm Metrodora Institute on Thursday said they are jointly investing in the development of diagnostics and treatment options for complex chronic diseases.
The firms said the project is intended to improve the identification and treatment of conditions such as long COVID, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Sjögren's syndrome, and myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The firms said they will develop and validate genotypic diagnostics that will give clinicians accurate assessments of patient disease risk and recommend treatment options as well as drug discovery opportunities that could lead to better patient outcomes.
PrecisionLife brings to the table its research into more than 50 complex diseases, and Metrodora will apply its clinical and research expertise. The firms plan to begin product development with a focus on long COVID and ME/CFS.
As part of the collaboration, Metrodora will run a concordance study that will compare the results of low-pass sequencing and genotyping. Following that study, PrecisionLife will be responsible for patient stratification biomarker development, risk scoring, and interpretation of the results while Metrodora will perform clinical validation studies.
The firms said they also intend to identify existing medicines that could be repurposed for treatment of those chronic diseases, validate their use for those new indications, and seek regulatory approvals for new personalized treatments.
"Moving with unprecedented speed and scale, we will work to rapidly establish this new class of genotypic diagnostic tools paired with targeted clinical trials at Metrodora," Metrodora CSO Rohit Gupta said in a statement.
PrecisionLife CEO Steve Gardner added that the firms' combined disease insights, patient support tools, and clinical expertise will hasten the clinical validation of new diagnostics and therapies for underserved patients.
PrecisionLife said in May 2022 that it was partnering with Sano Genetics to study the biomarkers of long COVID with goals of identifying biomarkers and treatments. The firm said at the time the companies planned to analyze patient data from Sano using PrecisionLife's combinatorial analytics platform.
Company officials also said in September 2022 that they had identified genes that were potentially related to the development of ME/CFS, and they intended to study whether those biomarkers could be used to identify treatments with existing drugs as well as animal models of the disease.