HMS, Clalit Collaboration Seeks to Improve Precision Medicine

Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Clalit Research Institute are launching a collaborative effort to advance precision medicine. The opportunity for collaborations was enabled by a donation from the Berkowitz family.

The program will function with two divisions to conduct joint research: The Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Living Laboratory at HMS and The Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Precision Medicine Clinic at Clalit. Additionally, the Clalit researcher division will feature a clinical component that will provide diagnostics and care for patients with rare, undiagnosed, and difficult to treat conditions.

While the researcher component will focus on generating insights from data and translating them into frontline clinical interventions, the educational component will train the next generation of biomedical informaticians and computational biologists.

Leading the effort is Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, and Ran Balicer, founding director of the Clalit Research Institute and chief innovation officer of Clalit Health Services.

“This work, powered by the passion and vision of the Berkowitz family, is an example of cross-pollination across countries, across institutions, and across disciplines,” dean of Harvard Medical School George Q. Daley said in a press release. “The scientific and educational paths forged by this collaboration and the medical insights enabled by these efforts will ripple beyond borders and across generations.”

The goal of the collaboration is to bring together and build upon each institution’s strengths. Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics thrives in the fields of data science, machine learning, and computational biomedicine. As part of Israel’s largest health insurance and medical provider, Clalit Research Institute is a world leader in translational science and innovation.

“The idea of precision medicine is not new. Providing the right care to the right patient at the right time has tantalized and bedeviled physicians for many decades, perhaps centuries,” said Kohane. “This ideal is now being brought closer to reality through visionary philanthropy that will fuel research and education at our two institutions and magnify each of their strengths.”

With precision medicine, researchers can look for patterns in how individuals with the same disease respond to certain treatments and pinpoint subtle shifts in certain biomarkers that could indicate a patient’s risk for disease relapse. 

Through the agreement, Clalit will create Israel’s first precision medicine clinic dedicated to identifying tailored therapies for patients whose treatment has not been effective. The clinic will also work to untangle medical mysteries in patients with undiagnosed diseases.

While the clinic’s work will immediately have an impact in Israel, the long-range goal is to yield insights and create therapies to benefit patients globally.

“We are aiming to enable profound health care improvements through groundbreaking medical research and discoveries, combining the world-leading clinical, data, and scientific experts at Clalit and HMS through the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Living Laboratory,” said Balicer. “We also look forward to saving lives at the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Precision Medicine Clinic.”

Scientific advances in the past 20 years have transformed the treatments of several types of chronic illnesses. Additionally, precision medicine has led to targeted therapies based on individual genomic profiles for lung cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma.

The promise of precision medicine capabilities goes beyond predicting how patients will respond to specific treatments based on their genomic profile and choosing the best target medication for the patient.  Precision medicine can also enable tailored predictions of disease well into the future, long before clinical detection.

“The many synergies of this collaboration will allow us to realize the vision of precision medicine and move towards a future of predictive medicine, where the power to anticipate medical risk can prevent people from getting sick in the first place,” said Ben Reis, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Predictive Medicine Group at the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program.

The teams of researchers and scientists will work together to study real-life data from millions of patients accumulated over decades. Analyzing the data will provide invaluable insights into the real-time behavior of diseases.

“Such insights can beget further ones by compelling researchers to ask questions about the origins of disease—the fundamental mechanisms that give rise to dysfunction,” said Shay Ben-Shachar, director of precision medicine and genomics at Clalit Research Institute. “This is the true long-term value of this effort.”

The two teams plan to examine two distinct groups of patients: those who responded exceptionally well to treatment and those who responded remarkably poorly. By studying, biomarkers, genetics, and proteins in patients within both groups, researchers could determine factors that lead to disease development and how to treat it.