Imagia Partners with Illumina to Scale Discoveries Across Genomic and Clinical Data

Advanced AI-discovery platform Imagia EVIDENS™ to link analysis of genomic data to patient outcomes for reproducible data-driven precision medicine research

MONTRÉAL, June 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -  Imagia, a leading healthcare AI company that unites healthcare expertise and advanced artificial intelligence technology, and Illumina, a global leader in DNA sequencing and analysis, today announced a partnership to investigate how genomics, clinical data and imaging will enable precision medicine, facilitating therapeutic selection and improve patient outcomes.

This agreement enables the creation of a seamless stream of genomic and health data, built to community standards, that delivers a scalable framework across medical imaging, drug development, and discovery. Imagia and Illumina's complementary cross-platform capabilities will enable streamlined, replicable research across the precision and personalized healthcare domains. The partnership will foster continued investigation into what precision medicine can and cannot see through different lenses and how alternatives, such as imaging, can depict complementary information on patient-specific biology towards an integrated healthcare.

Linking joint company expertise, Illumina facilitates ecosystem-wide genomic data interoperability with their DRAGEN™ Bio-IT Platform and Illumina Analytics Platform. In turn, Imagia EVIDENS™ will enable multi-centric research across organizations, populations, and medical disciplines. EVIDENS^TM is an AI-platform that ingests and indexes real-world data: such as labs, reports, and images to design evidence-based clinical studies. Through federated learning, EVIDENS^TM gains insights on distributed patient data while preserving privacy. Hospitals and research institutions onboarded with the platform currently account for potential access to over 4 million patients annually. This union organizes real world patient data to better understand disease evolutions and improve patient outcomes through new management tools. Together, the companies will investigate how the adoption of best-in-class community standards for analysis of genomic data using Illumina's DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform with imaging data can augment AI digital biomarker discoveries and deliver a truly personalized approach to precision medicine.

While the partnership creates united resources for discovery, it will also address and harmonize variations in the way hospitals and research institutions analyze patient information. "Partnering with Imagia brings the best of two worlds together to provide customers with the right data and tools to make novel discoveries that unlock the medical utility of the genome through intelligent application of AI on combined imaging and genomic data" said Rami Mehio, VP Instrument Software & Bioinformatics at Illumina.

The Imagia EVIDENS™ platform provides the innovation infrastructure required by healthcare researchers to deliver on the promise of AI-first discoveries: from patient cohorting, building AI-ready annotated datasets, to leveraging automated AI model discovery which delivers purely data-driven results. This achieves the goal of standardizing across data generation and analysis by creating a universal language across all medical institutions. This uniquely allows AI-driven discoveries for personalized care pathways and treatment plans. As part of any Imagia project that involves tissue sequencing, Illumina will contribute its expertise in large-scale genomics, alongside its suite of informatics products for streamlining uniform primary and secondary genomic analysis. The EVIDENS^TM platform will then perform machine learning for AI-driven discoveries on quality-sequenced Illumina omics-data. The collaborative results create uniform, standardized, AI-friendly, and patient-centric data to scale discoveries to direct the development of new targeted drugs.

"Federating automatic model discovery from the EVIDENS^TM platform will now be supercharged by having access to Illumina's vast genome sequencing and analysis expertise," said Imagia CTO Florent Chandelier. "No one knows more than Illumina about the genome and importance of bringing the right scalable analysis tools to the combination of high-quality genomic data with patient data to drive precision medicine. Together, we augment this know-how with evidence-based AI research through Imagia's growing network of EVIDENS^TM partners around the world, expanding our company's hospital-wide real-world data access.'' Clinicians can now associate genomic information to patient outcomes in an AI-friendly reproducible manner. Together, Imagia and Illumina are building the foundation for next wave healthcare innovation and ultimately bringing precision medicine into routine clinical care. 

About Imagia
Imagia, an artificial intelligence and healthcare company, develops digital medical innovations that aim to improve the health of cancer patients and those with other heavy-burden diseases. Through its collaborative ecosystem, Imagia EVIDENS^TM enables hospitals, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and diagnostic companies around the world to access and utilize healthcare data while preserving data privacy. Headquartered in Montreal, Imagia's mission is to unlock the potential of data across all organizations to achieve collaborative, medical breakthroughs. imagia.com

SOURCE Imagia

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