BC Platforms Partners with Australian Tissue Bank (ABCTB) to Improve Breast Cancer Treatment Outcomes

BC Platforms Partners with Australian Tissue Bank (ABCTB) to Improve Breast Cancer Treatment Outcomes 

ABCTB joins the world’s top biobanks and healthcare data collections in the Global Data Partner Network BCRQUEST.com

13 April 2021 – Zurich, Switzerland and Boston, USA – BC Platforms, a global leader in healthcare data management, analytics and access announced that it has formed a new data partnership with the Australian Breast Cancer Tissue Bank (ABCTB) for its BCRQUEST.com Global Data Partner Network. The collaboration will support the ACBTB’s mission to improve the treatment outcomes of patients with breast cancer. The ABCTB tissue bank is hosted at the University of Sydney’s Westmead Institute for Medical Research.

ABCTB has a substantial collection of tissue samples going back to 2006, including over 10,000 samples from 5,000 participants as well as their linked associated treatment and clinical data. The collection includes cancerous and normal tissue samples supporting studies ranging from the identification of common gene variants in breast cancer, to using machine-learning algorithms to distinguish subtypes and polygenic risk scores to predict breast cancer.

Jennifer Cubino, COO, Customer Success and Data Sciences at BC Platforms, commented, “Our global footprint of the Global Data Partner Network BCRQUEST.com is rapidly growing as organisations recognise the value of rapid access to expertly curated and carefully governed patient data which is otherwise difficult to obtain. We welcome ABCTB to our global coalition of data partners, enabling deep data access that can improve outcomes for affected patients.”

Professor Christine Clarke, Emeritus Professor, The University of Sydney, Distinguished Scientist, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research, and Chair, the Australian Breast Cancer Tissue Bank, said, “Our collaboration with BC Platforms is a new pathway to facilitate worldwide access to the ABCTB resource. We are excited about the potential to translate current research knowledge into clinical practice, including investigating the molecular basis of disease and gaining a deeper understanding of the genomic predictors of response to drugs and potential new therapeutics”.

The Global Data Partner Network BCRQUEST.com is an integrated healthcare network that provides a streamlined solution for researchers to efficiently access harmonized data, driving improved sharing and faster research insight generation. The platform and its supporting framework enable collaboration between pharmaceutical institutions, healthcare and academic researchers while strictly adhering to global and local data privacy and security regulations.

The partnership with ACBTB is the latest in a series that has brought together data representing 20 million patient lives from leading healthcare data custodians across the globe. Last October, BC Platforms announced a new data partnership with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine (CCPM) at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus  incorporating clinical and genomic-consented records and biobank samples. In April 2020, BC Platforms announced that it has added three new leading biobanks to BCRQUEST.com, including Generation Scotland, UK, Bialystok Biobank, Poland, and Biobank Graz Austria.