Seqster, Scripps Research Translational Institute to Study Data Impact on Healthcare Decisions

Seqster said today its health data management platform will be integrated with Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI)’s MyGeneRank app in a collaboration designed to promote better healthcare decisions by app users through tracking of medications and lifestyle modifications.

The collaboration, whose value was not disclosed, was announced at the 2018 American Society of Human Genetics Meeting, being held October 16-20 in San Diego.  

SRTI researchers have developed a smartphone-based study aimed at better understanding how health decisions are impacted by receiving personal genetic risk information. MyGeneRank is designed to allow individuals with genetic data from the consumer genomics company, 23andMe, to obtain an estimated genetic risk score for coronary artery disease (CAD).

“While the risk of CAD can be estimated with MyGeneRank, the quality and the richness of the health and genetic data that goes into our risk calculation plays a pivotal role in putting the final risk score into context and making the result actionable,” Ali Torkamani, Ph.D., Director of Genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in a statement.

“With the integration of MyGeneRank with the Seqster platform, we combine the highest quality data with actionable information for users to engage with and learn from all in a secure privacy preserving manner,” added Dr. Torkamani, who has led the team behind MyGeneRank at SRTI, and is also an associate professor, integrative structural and computational biology at Scripps Research.

Surveys and digital health data will be used to determine if the information helped guide decision-making related to lifestyle modification and initiation of medications, Seqster said.

Seqster’s digital platform is designed to allow organizations to enable their employees, members, or patients to collect, own and share data about their health, their DNA and their fitness data, which they can integrate, manage, and access from a single digital portal.

“Our collaboration with MyGeneRank will enable our users to collect crucial health data from across the large number of healthcare providers, fitness and wearable devices and combine that information with their 23andMe data thereby not only providing immediate information on cardiovascular risk, but also allowing our users to track and monitor their cardiovascular risk as they modify their fitness and diet,” Ardy Arianpour, CEO and co-founder of Seqster, said in a statement.

Headquartered in San Diego, Seqster was launched in February 2018 with $4 million in seed financing. Seqster oversees a platform that now connects users to more than 9300 healthcare providers covering 2000 hospitals, 8400 medical and specialty groups and 300 cancer center locations nationwide.

Additional providers are added daily, according to the company, which adds that the platform is HIPAA compliant and secure.