On October 29, Dr. Kate Torchilin, CEO of Novaseek Research, will lead the webinar “Biosample  Exchanges – the Past, the Current and the Future – How Do We Make It Work?”   Dr. Torchilin will be joined by John Spall from GSK and Dr. Philip Quinlan from University of Nottingham, UK.

This is part of the webinar series organized by Pistoia Alliance, a global, not-for-profit alliance of life science companies, vendors, publishers, and academic groups that work together to lower barriers to innovation in R&D.

Access to biosamples remains one of the main bottlenecks in pharma R&D.  Researchers need access to the right biosamples from the right patient and the right time. Millions of dollars have been invested both in creating biosample repositories as well as the collection infrastructures, by government, academia and industry; millions in budget approvals continue to be requested each year for acquiring biosamples for research.  Thousands of biobanks and sample collections have been created within various for-profit and non-for-profit entities.  This panel of experts will discuss approaches that can be pursued to increase transparency of information and streamlined approaches to acquiring biosamples.

In a recently released 100-page report, a working group of experts from academia, government, and industry for the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) announced by President Obama earlier this year, recommended to the NIH that anyone in the US willing to share their health data, a blood sample, and be recontacted for research purposes should be allowed to join the PMI. The PMI initiative has an ambitious goal 1 million participants, and this massive cohort would be used to gain insights into a range of important healthcare questions.

Throughout the report, the working group emphasized that the 1 million-participant cohort should reflect the diversity of the US. The PMI must be designed from the start to “ensure that people historically underrepresented in biomedical research are included in sufficient numbers to allow robust inferences in these groups.” Additionally, in order to conduct such queries using data from so many people, the PMI must use up-to-date technologies to analyze the data, while protecting participants’ privacy and containing costs. Importantly, the working group also suggested that the NIH collaborate with healthcare provider organizations (i.e. hospitals, physician groups, etc.) as a means to enroll patients cost-effectively. This is where Novaseek’s Clinical Data Network for Research (CDNR) platform can play a critical role.
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The Novaseek CDNR platform is in strong alignment with the objectives presented by the PMI working group. Novaseek’s CDNR platform can support greater diversity in the cohort building process by tapping into large numbers of patients at geographically diverse locations, and by allowing inclusion of community hospitals and physician groups. While Novaseek can work with any hospital and medical center, its CDNR platform was developed to plug into the daily operations and workflows of community hospitals, and has both the cost structure and the features to allow community hospitals and large physician groups to provide data and biospecimens for research purposes without disruption to existing workflows. Ultimately, Novaseek’s approach will allow more patients at more hospitals to choose to participate in research, even if they are not being treated at a major academic research center.