Sensyne Health Signs Strategic Research Agreement with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine

Sensyne Health Signs Strategic Research Agreement with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine

New agreement covering 7.3 million patients brings Sensyne’s combined total dataset of anonymised and de-identified patient data for medical research to 18.2 million patients

Second U.S. Strategic Research Agreement by clinical AI pioneer Sensyne to enable the ethical application of clinical AI to improve patient care and accelerate medical research

Oxford, U.K, and Dover, Delaware, USA 24 May 2021: Sensyne Health plc (LSE: SENS) (“Sensyne” or the “Company” or the “Group”), the Clinical AI company, today announces that it has signed its second Strategic Research Agreement (“SRA”) in the U.S. with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine (“CCPM”), a partnership between non-profit health system UCHealth and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. 

The agreement will enable the ethical application of clinical AI research to improve patient care and accelerate medical research. This is in line with Sensyne’s strategy of building a world-leading health data platform with industrial scale and robust patient data protection.  The uptake of Sensyne’s model in the U.S. demonstrates growing appetite for more advanced ethical data sourcing supported by patient information protection.

The CCPM houses one of largest health data warehouses in the United States and has been a pioneer in driving large-scale personalized medicine and return of clinically actionable results through a research biobank, integrating personalized genomic information with clinical data. CCPM’s significant advancements in making pharmacogenomics a standard of care are already providing benefits, and with plans to expand the provision of personalized healthcare, patients will soon have access to more clinically-actionable results, including genomic mutations that confer risk to diseases such as cancer and cardiomyopathies. In tandem, through its partnership with UCHealth, CCPM is scaling efforts to include as many as 100,000 additional UCHealth patients per year.

The CCPM dataset covers 7.3 million de-identified and anonymised patients, including anonymised patient records from a UCHealth population of approximately 2.4 million active patients and a biobank of >180,000 research participants for which clinical genetic test results are being generated. UCHealth cares for patients through its network of 12 acute-care full-service hospitals and hundreds of clinic locations across Colorado, southern Wyoming and western Nebraska.

Consistent with Sensyne's approach with all of its Strategic Research Agreements, research will be undertaken to the highest standards of information governance and data security and in accordance with The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the U.S. data protection legislation that protects sensitive patient information. All data supplied to Sensyne for research will be de-identified by CCPM beforehand and will remain in the U.S., and the provision of the data will operate under an agreed set of data processing procedures. 

Under the terms of the agreement, should the medical research undertaken by Sensyne using CCPM’s data lead to medical discoveries commercialised by Sensyne, CCPM will share a proportion of Sensyne’s revenues generated from that research. The agreement quickly follows Sensyne’s first U.S. SRA announced on 21 May 2021 with St. Luke’s University Health Network, a leading U.S. health system serving patients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  These new US partners follow 11 National Health Service (NHS) Trusts in the U.K., covering more than 13% of the U.K. population, which have partnered with Sensyne sharing anonymised clinical datasets to enable the discovery of new treatments, increase disease understanding, and advance clinical trial design.

Kathleen Barnes, PhD, University of Colorado School of Medicine Professor and Director of CCPM, said: “This collaboration will take an already notable program at the CCPM and expand the depth and breadth of its capabilities, allowing us to give more back to patients everywhere through our collaborations. Our partnership with Sensyne Health will lead to an optimization of patient care, using personalized results to better inform research, clinical decision making, and potentially leading to new ways of diagnosing, preventing and treating illnesses.” 

Lord (Paul) Drayson, PhD, CEO of Sensyne Health, said: “This agreement with Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, covering both genomic and electronic health record data, will enable us to undertake research aimed at a deeper understanding of disease, and to accelerate the development of novel medicines in collaboration with our pharmaceutical partners.  I’m delighted to be working with CCPM and excited about the capability that our growing international data collaborative now offers to the global life sciences research community.”