NextBio Teams With Emory University for Cancer Biomarker Discovery

NextBio Clinical to be Used for Translational Research Focused on Multiple Myeloma

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NextBio today announced a partnership with Emory University and its Winship Cancer Institute using genomic data to identify unique biomarkers and treatments for patients with multiple myeloma. The centerpiece of the partnership is a translational research study that will use NextBio Clinical to interpret molecular data from patients with multiple myeloma, with the ultimate goal of making new discoveries that will improve the care of patients with refractory and relapsed forms of myeloma. These forms of myeloma, a plasma cell cancer that constitutes about 1% of all cancers in the United States, have been particularly challenging to treat.

“Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University is world-renowned for their research work in multiple myeloma”

“As a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated center, The Winship Cancer Institute is committed to using the latest technologies in conducting research studies,” said Sagar Lonial, M.D., nationally recognized authority on myeloma research and Director of Translational Research for the B-Cell Malignancy Program at Winship and principal investigator for the study. “For this study, we will be collecting RNA-seq, SNP, and CNV data from our own patient samples. In addition, we plan to access the multiple myeloma cell line data available in the NextBio Platform as well as myeloma data from public repositories that NextBio has curated. Integrating use of molecular data alongside clinical data in our cancer translational research projects is a top priority, and this partnership will help us solidify that workflow.”

“Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University is world-renowned for their research work in multiple myeloma,” said Alpana Verma-Alag, M.D., Head of Clinical Development at NextBio. “Through our work on this project we hope to positively impact the lives of those who suffer from this cancer. We also hope to take science a step forward by making it easy for researchers to integrate the use of genomic data in translational research.”

The Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University is the only NCI-designated cancer center in Georgia, and one of only 59 NCI-designated centers providing cancer care in the country. Winship investigators conduct more than 150 therapeutic clinical trials and enrolled 700 patients in 2011. Winship has the largest unit in Georgia for phase I clinical trials, which are important to introducing new therapies against cancer.

About NextBio

NextBio provides a state of the art scientific platform to aggregate and interpret large quantities of molecular and other life sciences data for research and clinical applications. NextBio’s platform integrates data from multiple repositories and diverse technologies by means of a unique correlation engine, which pre-computes billions of significant connections between disparate public and proprietary clinical and experimental data. This feature enables interpretation of an individual’s molecular data. It also provides translational researchers the ability to look across the clinical and molecular data of entire populations for clinical trial stratification and selection, hypotheses generation, and biomarker discovery. NextBio Clinical, which recently passed an independent HIPAA audit, is designed for seamless integration with existing clinical and research systems. Backed by highly scalable, Big Data technology, it is capable of analyzing petabytes of data. NextBio’s platform is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

Today, NextBio is used by researchers and clinicians in over 50 top commercial and academic institutions including the University of Southern California, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Genzyme, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Regeneron, Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Takeda and many others. To learn more about NextBio, please visit our website at http://www.nextbio.com.