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Perlegen Gains Exclusive Access to Data on Four Million Patients to Enable Personalized Medicine

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 March 2008, 09:01 CDT

Perlegen Sciences, Inc. announced today that it has formed a personalized medicine collaboration with an undisclosed electronic medical records (EMR) provider to identify and develop genetic markers to help predict how patients are likely to respond to specific medical treatments. Perlegen and its partner will mine data from the EMR's growing information warehouse, which currently contains clinical treatment and outcome data on roughly four million patients, to enable the identification of subsets of patient records which meet highly specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Working via each patient's individual care provider, Perlegen will then seek to obtain DNA from these highly-selected patients in a HIPAA-compliant, IRB-approved manner, to help physicians address various medical situations in which genetically-based predictions about treatment response may help significantly improve patient care.

Patient selection and DNA collection has already begun for Perlegen's initial diagnostic programs, with additional sample collection programs scheduled to begin in the coming months. In compliance with federal privacy laws and the policies and procedures of each healthcare provider, Perlegen will never have access to specific patient identities, but instead will only receive de-identified patient records, which can then be re-identified only by participating healthcare institutions in a HIPAA-compliant, IRB-approved manner. Once re-identified, participating patients and physicians will receive compensation for providing samples for further analysis to help better understand the genetic influences important in predicting patient-by-patient responses to drug therapy.

Under the terms of the agreement, Perlegen will have exclusive access to the EMR's rapidly growing database of US records for the purpose of assessing and selecting patients from whom appropriate samples could be collected. The EMR provider will earn subscription and program fees, as well as significant participation in milestone payments tied to the successful launch of new diagnostic tests resulting from the collaboration. Perlegen will receive an ownership position in the EMR provider tied to the achievement of certain revenue levels.

Making personalized medicine a reality relies on the discovery and validation of genetic markers to help predict how patients might respond to specific medical treatments. The discovery of such markers has been long delayed by the lack of appropriate DNA sample sets linked with rich clinical information. But now, by collaborating to gain access to this dataset of long-term patient records integrated from multiple sources and mapped into a standardized, fully-searchable data structure, Perlegen can quickly identify patients from whom properly consented, clinically-meaningful DNA samples could rapidly be obtained.

"Our initial diagnostic programs are aimed at helping to guide physicians in prescribing treatments that impact tens of millions of patients each year, costing billions of dollars," commented Rob Middlebrook, Perlegen's Chief Corporate Development Officer. "This collaboration removes one of the greatest obstacles to creating these revolutionary predictive tests -- the lack of access to meaningful clinical samples based on treatment and outcomes data from millions of patients."

About Perlegen Sciences

Perlegen's mission is to discover and commercialize genetic variations that can make a difference to patients and physicians. The company's expertise is in understanding human genetic variation within and across diverse patient populations and in conducting studies aimed at identifying those variations that are predictive of drug response, including both toxicity and efficacy. For more information about the company and its technologies, visit Perlegen's website at www.perlegen.com.

Source: Business Wire

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