Real-World Data Collaboration to Advance Chronic, Acute Disease Research

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU Medicine) and BJC HealthCare have announced a collaboration with real-world health data company CuriMeta to advance research aimed at predicting, preventing, and curing a wide variety of acute and chronic diseases.

Under the collaboration, WashU and BJC Healthcare will provide medical and research expertise, while CuriMeta will leverage its experience with real-world data management to help create a secure data-sharing platform for participating researchers. The three organizations will also jointly select projects and collaborators for participation.

WashU will also contribute expertise in developing advanced patient privacy protection methods and using artificial intelligence (AI) to create synthetic datasets. According to the press release, these insights will help ensure that the data shared on CuriMeta’s platform is high quality and meets all standards for health data sharing.

“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,” said David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of WashU Medicine, in a 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.”

Real-world data is key to advancing research on acute and chronic diseases and can play a significant role in informing public health response, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. A major focus of this collaboration is identifying new insights into cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and other neurological conditions, as well as rare diseases and childhood illnesses.

“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,” said Philip R. O. Payne, PhD, chief data scientist and director of the Institute for Informatics at WashU Medicine, in the press release. “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.”

This collaboration is the most recent in a string of data-driven initiatives to combat disease prevalence.

Last week, the Medical Device Innovation Consortium launched its Somatic Reference Samples Initiative, which aims to develop and validate clinically relevant samples and public genomic datasets to enhance next-generation sequencing-based cancer diagnostics.

This week, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine launched the Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center, which will support research to improve patient care for adults and children with kidney disease.