THE HBS Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator: A powerful voice in precision medicine

Last Thursday Novaseek Research had the chance to listen in on the Harvard Business School Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator Oncology Data Landscape Update call. The Kraft Accelerator was established last year to speed breakthroughs in precision medicine. The Accelerator aims to enable faster commercialization of high-impact innovations by addressing challenges that slow the advancement of precision medicine and disseminating best practices and models to overcome them.

Last week’s talk focused on the data landscape and its importance in driving precision medicine forward. The need is recognized across the industry, and the Kraft Accelerator is working to collate many databases that have been created by industry and outside organizations into a single, powerful resource for oncology. They are populating the database through crowdsourcing and taking a number of innovative approaches to build the database further. Scientists will access the database to create synthetic cohorts of patients and draw insights based upon vast amounts of real world patient data searchable to the most minute genomic sequence. It’s an incredible project, and one that will advance oncology research significantly.

However, there is a missing link. The phenomenal insights we would be able to gain need to be tied to real world patients. It underscores the importance of the Novaseek offering. As scientists define even more precisely the type of patient they are seeking for research, and later for linking the right treatment to the right patient, access to those patients and human biospecimens matching those specific criteria becomes even more critical to successful research and clinical studies. Using the CDNR platform from Novaseek, scientists can procure clinical data and human biospecimens that match exactly the characteristics identified in the cohort of interest and continue to follow those patients prospectively as they continue their research.
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Novaseek has a place at this precision medicine accelerator table. By offering an end-to-end solution for researchers, Novaseek’s CDNR provides real world clinical data and clinical data-enriched biospecimens for translational medicine, clinical feasibility and observational studies. It is encouraging to be part of an industry where so many are working tirelessly toward the same goal of getting better medicines to patients faster, leveraging technological advances not only for data analytics, but also for machine learning and crowdsourcing. We have an exciting new era of healthcare ahead.