What You Should Know:
- Culmination Bio, a data and technology company combining clinical and biospecimen data, announced an R&D collaboration with Merck, known as MSD, outside the United States and Canada, initially in the area of autoimmune disease.
- Under the terms of the master agreement, Merck will have access to both clinical (Electronic Health Records, labs, medications) and paired biospecimen (tissue and blood) data from several cohorts of various sizes and qualifications. This project-based collaboration leverages Culmination’s unique ability to build both retrospective and prospective deidentified multi-modal datasets in a disease-defined fashion.
Advancing Pharmaceutical Research Through Extensive Patient Data and Strategic Partnerships
Culmination Bio, a spinoff from Intermountain Health, possesses exclusive rights to a comprehensive collection of de-identified patient electronic health records and biospecimen data spanning over 40 years. With a continuously growing repository of over five million samples, the platform significantly accelerates patient recruitment for pharmaceutical research, aiding companies in rapid research queries.
Partnering with Intermountain Health facilitates the swift recruitment of potential clinical trial participants. Additionally, the platform enables researchers to conduct quick queries across various data types, supporting groundbreaking research from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery. In November 2023, Culmination Bio secured investment from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures, allowing further development of its database and expansion in collaboration with pharmaceutical partners.
“Our collaboration with Merck represents a significant milestone in our mission to accelerate healthcare research,” said Lincoln Nadauld, MD, Ph.D., president and CEO of Culmination Bio, “This agreement exemplifies the need for rapid access to high-quality longitudinal patient data spanning decades to inform clinical research.”
