Mount Sinai Health System today announced it will extend its work with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. through a collaboration with its wholly owned subsidiary, the Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC), to perform whole exome sequencing on 33,000 DNA and plasma samples housed in Mount Sinai’s BioMe™ Biobank, one of the first biobank repositories in the country to link DNA sequencing data to clinical information stored within the EMR.
“The Mount Sinai BioMe Biobank is distinguished by its rich diversity in patient populations linked to electronic medical records,” said Judy Cho, MD, Ward-Coleman Professor of Translational Genetics and Medicine and Director of The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We are extremely pleased to enter into this collaboration with the RGC to develop high-quality sequence data from the BioMe cohort. This partnership provides an important means of more effectively personalizing medical care throughout the Mount Sinai Health System.”
The BioMe Biobank constitutes one of the largest collection of samples collections in the United States that can be used for the analysis and sequencing of genetic material and comparison to long-term health outcomes. The RGC will perform whole exome sequencing to generate de-identified genomic data and analyze that data alongside EMRs, in order to discover actionable insights about human diseases that may be applied to drug discovery and development. The size and scope of the study, one of the largest of its kind, are meant to allow greater precision in identifying and validating the associations between genes and human disease, and potentially pinpointing more effective therapies for patients.
