Genedata and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation collaborate to improve patient care in Crohn’s disease

Genedata, the leading provider of enterprise software solutions for biopharmaceutical R&D, today announced the successful completion of a Data Science Services project in support of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s mission to advance precision medicines for Crohn’s disease and to improve patients’ quality of life. Researchers and clinicians collaborated with Genedata data scientists to integrate and analyze multi-omic and clinical data collected from large cohorts of patients with Crohn’s disease, to identify the most informative biomarkers that can be used to assess the risk to develop serious complications requiring surgery within five years after diagnosis. The combination of certain clinical parameters and specific ‘omic biomarkers has the potential to lead to significant improvement in Crohn’s disease patient care.

The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, the leading non-profit organization focused on research and patient care in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) for over 50 years, serves as a hub for Crohn’s disease research with the largest collection of IBD patient data from institutions around the world. To achieve the goal of accelerating treatments and cures, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation looked for a partner to leverage the multitude of longitudinal clinical and molecular data from different ’omic technologies from large Crohn’s disease cohorts. In choosing Genedata as its partner to integrate and analyze their vast collection of clinical and high-dimensional molecular data, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation recognized the firm’s extensive domain expertise gleaned over more than 20 years, along with the benefits offered by its unique precision medicine software platform for translational and clinical research, Genedata Profiler. The Genedata team of expert bioinformaticians leveraged these resources to deliver actionable results that could be used to develop a diagnostic product.

“Crohn’s disease is a chronic, often debilitating disease, for which there is currently no cure. Despite several treatment options, currently we lack predictive tests to determine the optimal treatment strategy early in the disease process, when the opportunity to improve outcomes is greatest. There is a significant unmet need to advance new diagnostic tools to enable precision medicine approaches and to optimize patient care according to the severity of the disease course,” said Andrés Hurtado-Lorenzo, Ph.D., Senior Director of Translational Research at the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. “We decided to implement cutting-edge data analysis methods to integrate clinical and genomic data from patients, as a strategy to advance our biomarker research efforts. We are pleased to have found in Genedata a trusted and reliable partner who provided us with expert knowledge in big multi-omic data analysis. This collaboration is helping us accelerate our search for precision biomarkers to prognosticate disease course and to guide early and effective personalized treatment decisions in Crohn’s disease patients.”

Commenting on the successful completion of the recent project, the CEO of Genedata, Othmar Pfannes, Ph.D., said, “The volume and complexity of multi-omic data together with clinical data is growingly rapidly and is challenging to analyze. Our Data Science Services together with our Genedata Profiler platform is set up to address this challenge and to enable our partners to make data-informed decisions on a per-project basis without having to build their own data infrastructure or hire data scientists.” Dr. Pfannes continued, “We are proud that our expertise has been helpful to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.”