SAN FRANCISCO, April 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Today Syntegra and Nashville Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), announced a collaboration to accelerate data driven innovation and research for drug discovery and development.
Nashville Biosciences was created to facilitate commercial R&D uses of VUMC’s comprehensive and growing BioVU® biorepository, a de-identified biobank of millions of longitudinal medical records spanning over 10 years with hundreds of thousands of linked genetic samples. Syntegra’s ability to create statistically accurate but non-identifiable synthetic populations from this data will create expanded opportunities for discovery, research and innovation through applications such as cohort expansion, missingness imputation and bias normalization, while adding a further layer of privacy protection for the underlying real-world data derived from VUMC’s electronic medical records. Syntegra and Nashville Biosciences will work together to lay the groundwork for these opportunities, initially validating the use of synthetic data to recreate a recent study done in collaboration between Nashville Biosciences and another collaborator comparing the performance of various treatments for type 2 diabetes.
Michael D. Lesh, SM MD FACC, founder and CEO of Syntegra commented, “We are excited to work with Nashville Biosciences to validate that synthetic data, generated by the Syntegra Medical Mind, provides the same clinical utility as real-world data, without the privacy risk. Synthetic data will unlock opportunities to dramatically accelerate how life-saving treatments reach patients.”
“The Syntegra Medical Mind works by extracting patterns of care within real data, and then creating a complete replica dataset,” added Ofer Mendelevitch, Syntegra cofounder and CTO. “These synthetic digital twins have the same statistical properties as the real data. However, there is no way to identify the information belonging to any real patient.”
Leeland Ekstrom, PhD, COO and cofounder of Nashville Biosciences said, “We are constantly looking for innovative new tools and approaches that we can deploy against our clients' R&D problems. The Syntegra Medical Mind is an analytic approach that does exactly that, and we are excited to test it in this specific application.”
About Syntegra
Syntegra is unlocking the promise of healthcare data by employing groundbreaking machine learning models to enable low-burden access to high-quality, privacy-preserved data. The result? AI-enabled synthetic data with the potential to dramatically accelerate the development of novel treatments and improve patient care by making data easily shareable without compromising patient privacy. Syntegra’s ever-expanding, pre-trained model — the “Syntegra Medical Mind” — is built from the statistical patterns of data across healthcare modalities, serving the diverse needs of stakeholders across the healthcare industry, including large health systems, life sciences companies, payers, data scientists and clinical research organizations. Syntegra is backed by well-established investment firms, including Sweat Equity Ventures, Hike Ventures, Impact Venture Capital, Village Global, Wisconsin Valley Ventures and Innovation Global Capital. Learn more at www.syntegra.io.
About Nashville Biosciences
Nashville Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), was created to harness the Medical Center’s extensive genomic and bioinformatics resources for drug and diagnostics discovery and development. Leveraging Vanderbilt University Innovation™, Nashville Biosciences serves as a commercial interface between outside companies and the formidable research capabilities represented by BioVU®, one of the world’s most comprehensive genetic databases linked to de-identified medical records with years of longitudinal clinical data. This unique asset is one of the largest and highest quality of its kind, providing an unprecedented opportunity to guide R&D activity in biotech, pharma, diagnostics, medical devices and other life sciences applications.
For more information, please visit www.nashville.bio, find us on LinkedIn, or follow us on Twitter.
Syntegra Contact: Carter Prince
Nashville Biosciences Contact: James Stover
