Preventative care is well established as the goal to maintaining a long and healthy life. A multitude of advice and recommendations on lifestyle choices are available, including establishing regular visits with clinicians to track health. However, while patients may seek medical advice for healthy living or treatment for disease, identifying precursors to disease symptoms is not always straight-forward and timing of diagnoses often fall far behind the onset of symptom formation.
A newly launched collaborative effort between Mayo Clinic and Thermo Fisher Scientific aims to address this very limitation in clinical practice.
“At Mayo Clinic, we are committed to transforming patient care through innovation,” says Gianrico Farrugia, MD, president and CEO, Mayo Clinic.
Utilizing their investigator-led research and clinical translation activities, Mayo Clinic is joining forces with Thermo, whose mission is to enable customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer through research and therapeutic production activities in the industry setting. Together, they have launched Precure, LLC, with the primary aim of integrating multi-omic and clinical data to identify early signs of disease.
“Precure, LLC, has the potential to create a step change in how we generate and apply multi-omics data to improve human health,” said Marc Casper, chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific.
“By harnessing the full potential of multi-omics data, Precure, LLC, aims to help us better understand disease before symptoms appear, accelerating discoveries that can lead to earlier diagnoses, more targeted treatments, and better outcomes for patients,” continued Farrugia.
Combining analysis of molecular and clinical data over time, Precure, LLC, hopes to improve understanding of the biological drivers of disease. This would enhance and accelerate drug development and potentially allow for earlier detection and diagnosis of disease, speeding up the time for patients to receive treatment or disease intervention, and allow for more personalized care across a multitude of diseases.
Precure, LLC, will bring together molecular data generated from one million biospecimens, linked with longitudinal clinical information collected over several years, integrating genomic and proteomic information with Mayo Clinic’s clinical data and expertise in a highly standardized setting. Integral to the continued analysis, identifying patterns within the datasets, is the use of advanced AI and large-scale data-analytics.
The founding organizations plan to leverage their complementary expertise to generate new molecular and clinical data, driving forward insights to positively impact patient care.
“By combining Thermo Fisher’s leadership in scientific technology with Mayo Clinic’s leadership in clinical care, research and innovation, we can create new opportunities at unprecedented scale to detect disease earlier, accelerate drug development and enable more precise therapies,” said Casper.
Precure, LLC, aims to be the next step towards improved patient care by providing the scale, infrastructure and collaborations needed to generate population-scale molecular data. They also hope to help translate discoveries into new diagnostics, therapeutics, and other healthcare solutions on top of the research acumen that Mayo Clinic’s Precure, LLC, Research program brings to the collaboration.
Mayo Clinic, as a nonprofit organization itself, notes that its involvement in Precure, LLC, is intended to advance its nonprofit mission. Any financial returns to Mayo Clinic would be reinvested in its mission of patient care, research, and education.
