Geneial was awarded an NIH grant to expand its privacy-preserving genetic data platform into pharmacogenomics (PGx)
HOUSTON, Nov. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Geneial, the HealthTech startup, continues its work to address the challenges of balancing privacy and data ownership interests with making genomic data more available for research and clinical settings. After recently announcing the launch of a platform for Rare Disease registries, such as the Xia-Gibbs Syndrome Registry, this new grant from the NIH National Library of Medicine (NLM) will enable the expansion of Geneial platform capabilities to address barriers facing the widespread clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics (PGx).
PGx promises to optimize drug dosage while minimizing adverse effects, enabling accurate decisions about treatment courses. However, barriers such as testing costs, difficulty bringing results from one clinic to another and the complexity of interpreting results preclude its widespread adoption. Sequencing an individual’s genome once and re-using it as needed for different clinical questions over time could reduce costs, but genomic data is incredibly sensitive and misuse of its contents could have far-reaching consequences for individuals and their genetic relatives. To address these concerns, Geneial aims to allow individuals to maintain ownership and transactional-level control over the use of their existing whole genome sequencing (WGS) data. Likewise, Geneial intends for doctors to be able to securely query an individual’s genome before prescribing a drug, receiving a personalized, PGx-guided dosage recommendation if authorized by their patient.
Dr. Rick Silva, Executive Director of Clinical/Translational/Industry Collaborations at the Texas A&M Center for Genomics & Precision Medicine, said, “Geneial’s approach to privacy preserving data mobility is prescient as digitization of genomic data in patient records and research data converge. In pharmacogenomics, clinical care and research are increasingly producing genetic data and the time has come where the patient can remain attached to that data and have agency over how that data moves across clinical and research ecosystems, for better population health and more timely clinical care where genotyping is needed for clinical decision support.”
The new NIH funding, a Phase I SBIR award, will support engineering a proof-of-concept that enables patient-specific PGx recommendations to be privately generated without visibility of the underlying whole genome sequencing (WGS) data, giving the individual granular control over release of information from their genome. Although genomic data is expensive to generate, under the proposed model genetic data can be generated once for an individual and reused for different purposes throughout their life. Increased control and privacy while enabling data re-use helps justify the cost of generating the data by increasing the data usefulness, portability, and value.
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Research reported in this publication is supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R43LM014350-01. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
SOURCE Geneial
