Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU) https://medicine.wustl.edu and BJC HealthCare https://www.bjc.org are partnering with CuriMeta https://curimeta.com, a new company using lifesaving research to fight chronic and acute diseases.
WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare are going to use data sets to help support research to predict, prevent, and cure a broad variety of diseases, and use advanced state-of-the-art technologies to protect patient privacy and confidentiality.
CuriMeta is going to develop a secure platform to share real world data sets with life science companies when their research goals align with WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare.
WashU, BJC Healthcare and CuriMeta will jointly select appropriate projects and collaborators. The collaboration will use Wash U Medicine’s expertise in developing advanced methods to protect patient privacy, including the use AI to create synthetic data sets. The plan is to ensure that the data shared by CuriMeta will be high quality and meet the guidelines for safe and private health data sharing.
The collection of data can lead to advances in understanding numerous other diseases by being able to identify cutting edge therapeutic strategies, often in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of more traditional clinical studies.
For example, by analyzing large amounts of de-identified data from patients with neurodegenerative diseases could help researchers more accurately predict a timeline for symptom progression and aid in the design of clinical trials that investigate early interventions for individuals.
Also by studying the de-identified data from patients who have experienced heart attacks, it may be possible to help predict who eventually will develop heart failure and then be able to identify the best preventive measures to help patients.
As Philip R. O. Payne, PhD, Director of the Institute for Informatics at WashU Medicine, reports “Such data could help find new uses for existing drugs and enable therapies to be delivered to the market quickly and more cost efficiently which would help complement our existing strengths in drug discovery and clinical research.”