Emmes, a global, full-service Clinical Research Organization dedicated to supporting the advancement of public health and biopharmaceutical innovation, announced a partnership with MedGenome aimed at accelerating breakthrough treatments, powered by human genomics, for rare disease patients.
“This is an exciting opportunity to partner with the leading genetic testing laboratory in India and South Asia to use our collective expertise to help bring faster and more innovative treatments to patients around the world who are suffering from rare diseases and desperately awaiting new therapies,” said Emmes Chief Executive Officer Dr. Christine Dingivan.
“The unmatched potential to build comprehensive and curated disease specific cohorts will leverage the power of large data sets to design smarter research protocols and to reduce the time it takes to identify rare disease patients for clinical trials. Ultimately, we hope this will result in more successful treatment outcomes.”
During its recognition of Rare Disease Day on March 5, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration noted, “Patients with rare diseases often have few or no treatment options. In 2020, we continued to see significant progress in the development of treatments for rare diseases, also known as orphan products.” In 2020, the FDA approved 32 novel drugs and biologics that had an orphan drug designation.
Traci Clemons, Ph.D., Emmes’ Chief Research Officer, explained that the two companies would collaborate to combine patients’ epidemiologic, phenotypic and genomic data into custom disease registries to enhance study design, support patient recruitment, and create standard control arms for advanced statistical models of treatment effect.
“There are so many rare diseases and, at the same time, a very small global pool of potential patients for these clinical trials,” she said. “Creating these disease registries across high population regions will give us an even greater opportunity to identify and recruit patients with these very rare diseases into clinical trials. These cohorts will, in a sense, offer a customized data resource for potential research sponsors, from biotech firms to large pharmaceutical companies and government research institutions.”
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