Global health technology company Royal Philips announced it is teaming up with molecular clinical decision support company N-of-One to enhance the capabilities of Philips’ IntelliSpace Genomics solution.
Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will collaborate to provide healthcare organizations with clinical analysis, annotation and interpretation of genomics, and other relevant patient and clinical data to enable the delivery of precision medicine for oncology patients. Concurrent with the unveiling of the partnership, Philips also announced that Westchester Medical Center Health Network will be the first health system to use the combined offering for the launch of WMCHealth’s new precision medicine initiative.
Chris Cournoyer, ceo of N-of-One said she sees significant opportunity for the company to deploy its molecular interpretation tools based on both Philips’ presence in the market and its approach to providing actionable information via its HealthSuite platform.
“This platform integrates everything: from data on electronic medical records to patient monitoring and radiology scans. I am particularly excited that they are building their genomics platform on the Philips Haelthcare Suite,” Cournoyer noted. “What is important about that from my perspective—having come out of the EMR (electronic medical records) world and based on what we are doing at N-of-One—is Philips gives us the opportunity to do clinical interpretation of genomic information with full patient context, to look at a patient holistically.
“That is the value proposition and the power of this partnership. Unlike a lot of companies in our space that look at content, a gene, or a variant, we look at patients,” Cournoyer added.
According to Louis Culot, general manager of Philips Genomics, working with N-of-One provides vital information, as it looks to help health systems fully embrace deploying genomics solutions in order to create precision medicine programs. “We are able to integrate the full patient context to use past labs and patient medical information that the clinicians need to make a decision,” he said. “But we don’t have the clinical evidence-based knowledge bases that N-of-One has [to] help guide clinical decision support. There are others who do similar work, but what differentiated their offering was the ability to take integrated lab results, and integrated tests, to create a more holistic view of the patient and use that in their interpretation services.”
The deployment at WMCHealth is the first full implementation of the combined offering, which has now been rolled out to all 10 hospitals in the system to provide precision medicine services.
“Our team at WMCHealth sees and treats the most complex cancer cases. Our new precision medicine platform for oncology is designed to leverage all available sources of critical information to help make the most informed decisions about each patient’s care,” noted John Fallon, M.D., Ph.D., director, department of clinical pathology, Westchester Medical Center, and chairman of pathology, New York Medical College. “WMCHealth’s new cancer diagnostic program gives us greater capabilities to test and validate clinical planning, through the fusion of highly specific and individualized patient information with massive and growing genomic knowledge of cancer.”
According to Dr. Fallon, the Philips IntelliSpace Genomics solution is a foundation for designing possible therapy plans in a digital framework—such as how to match a tumor’s genotype with a potential drug for the best outcome, or matching patients with clinical trials. “This is a powerful tool to help improve outcomes through precision medicine,” he added, pointing out that the genomics project is part of a larger investment by WMCHealth into groundbreaking diagnostic and treatment capabilities, including WMCHealth’s new cellular and tissue engineering laboratory—home to technology that facilitates cellular therapy under investigational new drug applications in support of treatments for a variety of hematological and oncological disorders and diseases.
The IntelliSpace Genomics solution can be configured to define new workflows, create new pipelines, or integrate new sources of data as required, and can be used for collaborative clinical analysis and sharing across multiple hospitals and their affiliates, either on-site or in the cloud, added Dr. Fallon.