Genetic Alliance and LunaPBC Partner to Support Personal Health and Accelerate Medical Breakthroughs

LunaPBC, founder of LunaDNA, the first community-owned genomic and health data platform, announced today its partnership with Genetic Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to providing ordinary people with powerful tools to transform research. Over the course of 2019, the organizations will merge Genetic Alliance's Platform for Engaging Everyone Responsibly engagement platform with LunaDNA to provide individuals and communities with more resources to support health management while maximizing research opportunities.

The partnership enables LunaPBC and Genetic Alliance to unite their shared mission and technologies to create seamless solutions to support individuals, disease foundations, and patient advocacy organizations while also powering disease research at scale. Shared values across both organizations will ensure the ongoing focus of honoring a person's preferences and rights for data transparency, privacy, and control while accelerating science and creating shared value.

In December 2018, LunaDNA received precedent-setting approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to recognize an individual's health data as currency with which to acquire shares of ownership in the company. Researchers from nonprofits, for-profits, disease organizations, and research communities can request access to the LunaDNA platform to conduct research studies. LunaDNA members' de-identified, aggregated, and encrypted health data helps power research at the scope and scale needed for medical breakthroughs.

"The joining of Genetic Alliance's patient outreach and engagement with LunaDNA's person-centered data management expertise takes advantage of both organizations' exceptional strengths. This will accelerate the research opportunities afforded by rich, longitudinal data, and a cohort of research-aware participants and has the potential to change the clinical research paradigm and how participants are connected to clinical trials," said Michelle Penny, co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicines Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health.