Centene Corp https://www.centene.com located in Clayton Missouri, and Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis https://medicine.wustl.edu, have formed a partnership to transform and accelerate research into treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
As part of the partnership Centene will fund up to $100 million over 10 years for research performed at Washington University. The funding will help the School of Medicine’s Personalized Medicine Initiative to develop customized disease treatments and prevention for patients.
Any innovations arising from the initiative will be commercialized through the “ARCH Personalized Medicine Initiative”, a joint venture between the School of Medicine and Centene. ARCH is designed to accelerate the development and implementation of affordable and accessible health solutions to the public by using the intellectual property developed from the research.
The investment will help develop the university’s research and biomedical capabilities including state-of-the-art technologies such as CRISPER. Also, development will take place with other technologies in the areas of microbiome, immunomodulatory therapies, cancer genomics, neurodegeneration, cellular reprogramming, chemical biology, informatics, and in other areas.
In addition the funds will strengthen resources at more than a dozen centers and institutes at the Washington University School of Medicine, to include the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs, Siteman Cancer Center, Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell II Genome Institute, Institute for Informatics, and the Center for Regenerative Medicine.
David H. Perlmutter, MD Executive Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs said, “I believe the most important advance to evolve from the personalized medicine paradigm will come from harnessing genome engineering technologies to build better model systems of each human disease. By using deep genomics and clinical characterization more effectively, less expensive clinical trials will be possible.”