St. Louis, Missouri-based insurer Centene said it will fund up to $100 million in research at the Washington University School of Medicine to accelerate personalized treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes and obesity. The 10-year collaboration will help bolster Washington University’s Personalized Medicine Initiative. Innovations that emerge from the research will be commercialized through a joint venture between the school and Centene called the ARCH Personalized Medicine Initiative. The new funding will directed at research areas like CRISPR gene editing technologies, cancer genomics, immunomodulatory therapies and cellular reprogramming. Other divisions of the medical school that will receive support from Centene include the Siteman Cancer Center, the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology and the Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Genome Institute. “We share the goal of helping to improve the health of our communities through research, education and customized treatment for people suffering from chronic illnesses,” Centene CEO Michael F. Neidorff said in a statement announcing the partnership. “We believe personalized medicine is the path to ensure patients get the targeted health care they need to fight disease, and we look forward to partnering with such a renowned medical school to initially focus on four diseases that impact millions of Americans, including many of our health plan members.” Precision medicine research efforts have been one of the largest beneficiaries of mega-grants in recent years. One prominent example was the $200 million donation to Harvard Medical School by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the largest ever in the school’s history. While precision medicine treatments and tools have been positioned as the future of many diseases with a genetic component, payment models have often lagged behind medical research. The big commitment from Centene signals a growing understanding among health plans of the necessity of personalized medicine treatments to save costs and improve outcomes in a value-based healthcare system. Washington University School of Medicine Dean David Perlmutter said the partnership hopes to move up the timeline for the development of precision medicine treatment pathways to create therapies in the next five to seven years. “I believe the most important advances that will evolve from the personalized medicine paradigm will come from harnessing genome engineering technologies to build better model systems of each human disease, and utilizing deep genomic and clinical characterization to enable more effective and less expensive clinical trials,” Perlmutter said in a statement. “The partnership supports our global leadership in understanding sequence variants in biological systems that will pave the way for new therapeutic targets, as well as learning more about our own innate biology. Once personalized medicine becomes common practice, health-care workers may examine each patient’s genome — as well as information regarding his or her environment, lifestyle and social network — to identify a customized, affordable approach to optimizing health and medical care.” Picture: solidcolours, Getty Images
US insurer Centene will invest up to $ 100 m in a 10-year collaboration with Washington ##tech School of Medicine to develop personalised treatments for obesity , breast cancer , Alzheimer ’s disease and diabetes . The researchers will focus on CRISPR gene therapy , immunomodulatory therapies , cellular biology and cancer genomics . Any treatments resulting from the partnership will be commercialised via joint venture , the bio Personalized medicines Initiative .