From the CEO, Adrienne Mendoza: Exploring the future of precision and personalized medicine at BioBridge Global such as from advanced therapies
This month, I want to highlight the exciting work being done across BioBridge Global to enable the future of precision and personalized medicine. Through various projects, we are helping make significant strides and rapidly accelerating this field.
Precision medicine is an approach to healthcare that takes into account both population level and individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. By understanding an individual patient’s unique factors in disease risk, and how a patient may respond to different treatments, healthcare providers can tailor treatment plans to the individual patient through personalized medicine, maximizing their chances of success while minimizing potential side effects.
Advanced therapies, such as cell and gene therapies, can harness the power of human cells, either directly from a patient or those from a donor, to treat a wide range of diseases, including cancer, genetic disorders, and autoimmune diseases. These types of therapies are the ultimate expression of precision medicine because they are designed to target the underlying causes of disease at the cellular level.
Currently, one of the most promising types of advanced therapy is CAR-T therapy. CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell) is a type of immunotherapy that involves engineering T-cells to target and destroy cancer cells.
This type of therapy has shown remarkable results in clinical trials, with many patients achieving complete remission from their cancer. We have been working with multiple customers over the past few years to enroll donors, collect, test, preserve and ship these cells to support patients receiving these therapies.
One of the challenges in the field of precision and personalized medicine is that vast amounts of data are needed to improve and inform decisions, hence why one enabling technology for this field is artificial intelligence (AI). AI can help analyze vast amounts of data. However, it’s essential to ensure that AI models are developed based on diverse and complete data sets that reflect the needs and experiences of all patients, regardless of their social determinants of health.
Unfortunately, health and research databases have not been inclusive of all populations, particularly those from marginalized or underrepresented communities. Income, education, and access to healthcare can lead to disparities in health outcomes and an incomplete understanding of health needs across different populations.
A more complete understanding of population health is needed, and to this end, we are proud to support the NIH research program, All of Us, by enrolling research participants to collect health data from a diverse range of people, including those from historically underrepresented communities.
This study will gather data from a wide range of sources, including electronic health records, surveys, and wearable devices, and will be one of the largest and most diverse health databases in the world. By participating in this initiative, we are helping to build a more comprehensive understanding of human health and disease, which may ultimately lead to better treatments and cures.
I am very optimistic about the future of precision and personalized medicine because of our organization’s direct role in this field in numerous areas. Through our work with customers that are developing new therapies, and through research initiatives that will improve the source data, we are expanding our mission by making significant progress towards better treatments and cures for all.
This is what we are made for at BioBridge Global.
Working together, we’re building a bridge to a healthier future, through the healing power of human cells and tissues!
