Invitae and Deerfield Management Company announced a partnership to advance genetics-based drug discovery and development in rare disease. The partnership will leverage genetics and clinical data from millions of patients and Deerfield’s broad drug discovery and development expertise.
“Invitae’s core objectives include expanding access to genetic information to improve healthcare for patients. Through this partnership, we intend to serve millions of families affected by rare diseases with high unmet needs,” said Farid Vij, general manager of patient network and data at Invitae. “Our genetic and clinical data platform is highly enriched with patients possessing rare disorders, enabling a deeper understanding of the natural history and genetic basis of these diseases, and improving the success rate of new clinical programs.”
“Despite significant research efforts, there are thousands of rare diseases without a line of sight toward a viable therapeutic intervention,” said Matt Nelson, head of genetics and genomics at Deerfield Management. “Invitae’s unique data and analytics capabilities position it to interrogate genetic effects on rare and many other diseases. With Deerfield’s extensive experience in rare diseases and drug discovery, we believe there is strong potential for this partnership to uncover valuable patient insights and create important therapies for a range of currently untreatable conditions.”
Precision medicine offers great promise to address unmet needs of rare disease patients, but to be successful, scientists need access to focused genetic and clinical data across sizable patient populations. For rare diseases, these data are hard to find. For example, large scale genetic biobanks have been valuable for driving forward research, but they, at times, leave rare disease researchers searching for additional data on symptomatic and diverse patients.
Invitae and Deerfield aim to address notable research gaps by drawing insights from Invitae’s data platform, which includes sizable cohorts of rare disease patients. The companies will collaborate to analyze data from the over 3.6 million genetic tests delivered by Invitae linked to longitudinal clinical data, strictly in accordance with patients’ preferences for sharing of their data. With these data and analytics expertise, together Invitae and Deerfield will be well-suited to uncover insights needed to discover and validate novel rare disease targets.
“Both large and small biopharma companies are constantly seeking ways to improve efficiency and success rates in their discovery and development programs. This partnership demonstrates how Invitae can support biopharma partners in discovering and validating new precision therapies,” said Daniel Anderson, head of patient network and data partnerships at Invitae. “Beyond the opportunity to deliver new medicines together with the Deerfield team, this partnership further substantiates the many ways our unique datasets and analytical capabilities can create value.”