Can Data Science Unlock the Secrets of Asian Genomes?
- By CDOTrends editors
- October 09, 2023
While the world races to find solutions for emerging and longstanding diseases, a significant portion of the global population remains underrepresented in genetic studies. This gap is particularly evident in Asian genomes, crucial to understanding and treating diseases prevalent in this vast and diverse region.
Boehringer Ingelheim has recently partnered with Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) to try and address this very challenge. Their joint mission? To transform healthcare and improve patient outcomes in Singapore and globally.
This collaboration hopes to supercharge Singapore's precision medicine research, fostering innovation and industry collaboration in data science. The partnership aims to create a comprehensive database that includes all ethnicities by connecting genetic data with symptoms and lifestyle information. They believe this inclusive approach will pave the way for developing treatments tailored for people worldwide.
Jan Nygaard Jensen, global head of computational biology and digital sciences at Boehringer Ingelheim, emphasized the significance of this partnership. “With this partnership with PRECISE, we are pioneering deep translational insights for Asian patients within our focus disease areas, further bolstering our data science ecosystem. Building a leading, ethnically balanced data science platform will enable us to accelerate our research and create deeper insights to inform drug discovery and development,” he remarked.
Professor Patrick Tan, executive director of PRECISE, echoed this sentiment. “This partnership will lead to insights that better predict and prevent chronic diseases, which complements PRECISE’s long-term strategy in enhancing preventive health and improving patient outcomes through data-driven health solutions,” he stated.
Central to this initiative is the PRECISE-SG100K study, a comprehensive health study involving 100,000 Singaporeans. This research aims to uncover the myriad factors, from social and environmental to lifestyle and genetic, associated with diseases common in Asian populations, like diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.
Consortium partners will employ advanced data science techniques to analyze anonymized datasets from this study, adhering to Singapore's stringent data access and governance standards. The goal is to unearth new insights into the mechanisms that drive health and disease in Asia.
With a commitment to translational research and a digital strategy that spans the entire R&D value chain, Boehringer Ingelheim collaborates with global programs like Genomics England, FinnGen, Our Future Health UK, and the UK Biobank.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Design Cells