Datavant and Verge Genomics Forge Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Drug Development

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Datavant, a company focused on organizing and structuring healthcare data to inform actionable insights for the design and interpretation of clinical trials, and Verge Genomics, a company using artificial intelligence to discover and develop new therapeutics, today announced a strategic alliance to unlock the value of pharmaceutical datasets to accelerate drug discovery and development.

Datasets with relevance to drug development are currently siloed and fragmented across pharmaceutical companies, payers, hospital systems, and many others. Datavant partners with a wide range of healthcare organizations to aggregate and integrate these datasets, with over 100 clinical datasets reflecting over 150 million unique patients integrated to date. This is complementary to Verge's proprietary machine learning algorithms, drug discovery engine, and patient database. When combined, the collaboration aims to connect the full stack of data from early discovery to clinical development and apply machine learning to unlock dozens of breakthrough opportunities and insights for clinical trial design and interpretation.

This alliance marks the third innovative data partnership that Verge has struck in the last six months and its first expansion into the pharmaceutical data landscape. Since September, Verge has forged two innovative public-private partnerships across a dozen academic and national institutions, leading to the creation of one of the world's largest collections of ALS and Parkinson's Disease patient data.

Roivant Sciences, with the investment support of SoftBank Vision Fund and Founders Fund, spun out Datavant in September 2017 as an important part of its goal to reduce the time and cost of the drug development process.

"At Verge, we believe that breaking down the barriers that exist between industry, academia, computation and biology is critical to fully realizing the potential of AI in drug discovery," said Alice Zhang, CEO of Verge Genomics. "Our partnership with Datavant advances this mission by opening up new data opportunities previously siloed within pharmaceutical companies."

"Verge's robust data and expertise in computational biology add tremendous value in contextualizing signals seen in clinical trials and providing a foundation for better trial designs. We are delighted to partner with Verge to accelerate the drug development process and get more treatments to the patients who need them," said Travis May, President and Co-Founder of Datavant. 

About Datavant
Datavant is a technology company dedicated to organizing and integrating the world's healthcare data. Datavant's products improve the design and interpretation of clinical trials through data integration and artificial intelligence, increasing the odds of success of clinical trials and helping more drugs reach patients. Datavant's vision is backed by Roivant Sciences, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Founders Fund and is located in San Francisco. For additional information, please visit http://www.datavant.com.

About Verge Genomics
Verge Genomics is a next-generation therapeutics company that is using human genomic data to accelerate drug discovery. Founded by scientists from leading neuro-genomics labs, the Verge team is 14 people including 12 Ph.D.'s in machine learning, neuroscience, applied math, biophysics, statistics, and computational biology from UCLA, Stanford, Oxford, UCSF, and the pharmaceutical sector. For additional information, please visit http://www.vergegenomics.com.

CONTACT: Lucia Huang, lucia@vergegenomics.com

SOURCE Verge Genomics