Over 350 million people suffer from asthma today. Even worse, more than 400,000 die from asthma each year. Despite medical advances in drugs and therapies, this reactive airway illness continues to pose a serious health problem. But this is where precision medicine for asthma care offers tremendous hope. Sema4, Sanofi and the Mount Sinai Health System have combined forces to try and solve this problem. The answers these healthcare organizations could find over the next five years could change asthma care dramatically.
Sema4 – A New Venture Linking Academics to Business
Sema4 is a health company that launched in June of 2017. But unlike other healthcare startups, Sema4 had some pretty strong backing. The patient-centered, predictive-health company is a commercial venture sponsored by the Mount Sinai Health System. Specifically, Mount Sinai Innovation Partners has begun introducing such ventures into the health-technology space. Sema4 is one example of a venture that commercializes technologies developed by the Mount Sinai Health System’s researchers.
The company’s focus clearly involves the use of machine learning and data analytics as a tool to advance personalized medicine. Though Sema4’s early endeavors have involved reproductive health and cancer care, the current study explores precision medicine in asthma care. Using its Health Intelligence Platform, Sema4 plans to use advanced network modeling to discover new insights. Ultimately, this will provide opportunities to implement precision medicine for asthma care that tailors unique management to a specific individual.
The Value of Collaboration with Mount Sinai Health System and Sanofi
The collaborative study exploring precision medicine in asthma care will examine over 1,200 patients with asthma. As New York’s largest integrated health delivery system, the Mount Sinai Health System offers tremendous volumes of data for analysis. The specific data to be examined will include clinical information, genomics, immunology data, and a number of environmental inputs. Participants in the study will even wear a mobile device that collects sensory data about each of their environment and activities.
Through the study, researchers hope to learn more about what triggers asthma attacks. In turn, this will lead to better precision medicine for asthma care by understanding each individual’s profile. For Sanofi, this provides a new approach to drug development. With the digital analytics information provided by Sema4, Sanofi can refine drug development while advancing precision medicine for asthma care. This results in a win-win for everyone, especially those with asthma.
“Our goal is to develop a holistic view of each patient in the study, which is why we’re excited to add digital technology to the traditional types of medical examinations conducted in this study.” – Frank Nestle, Global Head of Immunology and Inflammation Research and Chief Scientific Officer, North America, at Sanofi
Sanofi is a global healthcare leader with over 100,000 employees present in 100 countries. They offer healthcare solutions for Diabetes and Cardiovascular diseases, oncology, immunology, Multiple Sclerosis, and Rare Diseases.
What Precision Medicine for Asthma Care in the Future Might Look Like
The five-year study exploring better precision medicine for asthma care offers the potential for better health outcomes for millions. Advanced data analytics and machine learning insight will assist providers in caring for patients. Drugs can then be better aligned with a patient’s molecular and environmental profile. Likewise, insight might be revealed to better guide health policies that could reduce the prevalence of asthma altogether. Ultimately, precision medicine for asthma care enables better use of resources while improving patients’ health.
The collaboration between Sema4, Mount Sinai Health System, and Sanofi also highlights another important fact. A major health issue like asthma is not only complex but costly to society. Partnerships such as these – that connect private business with academic research – offer bold strategies to address such issues. This beneficial in advancing precision medicine for asthma care, and it can promote better healthcare in general. Collaborative studies that involve private businesses and academic institutions will likely be more common in the years to come.
