MolecularHealth's Use of Clinico-Molecular Informatics™ for Oncology Treatment Decision Support Presented at Meeting of Nation's Leading Clinical Research Physicians

SAN FRANCISCO, April 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MolecularHealth, a leader in clinico-molecular informatics^™, today announced that Stephan Brock, Ph.D., the company's president, showcased the use of clinico-molecular informatics for oncology treatment decision support at the SWOG Spring 2012 Group Meeting in San Francisco. SWOG (formerly Southwest Oncology Group) is one of the five cooperative groups that together comprise the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) National Clinical Trials Network. Each year, SWOG hosts two Group Meetings to review progress made towards findings cures for cancer and to determine future directions. MolecularHealth was the only company invited to present at this semiannual event, which hosted around 1,000 of the nation's leading clinical research oncologists.

Dr. Brock presented a talk entitled "Employing Information Technology to Achieve DNA-Guided Treatment Decision Support" during a special symposium on molecular pathways in clinical trials chaired by James Hicks, Ph.D., Professor of Cancer Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In his presentation, Dr. Brock discussed how challenges of data quality and under-developed analytics often prevent clinicians from effectively employing the significant volume of data available to them during clinical decision-making. Using the case of a patient with Ewing's Sarcoma receiving treatment at a leading cancer center, Dr. Brock showed how MolecularHealth's platform is able to integrate a variety of disparate data sets, such as the patient's genomic information, treatment history and clinical evidence available in peer-reviewed literature, to reveal meaningful patterns that can influence prioritization of the therapeutic approaches most likely to be efficacious and safe for the patient.

"I wanted our investigators to learn more about who's out there working with genomics informatics," said Laurence H. Baker, D.O., the group chair of SWOG and Collegiate Professor in Cancer Developmental Therapeutics at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. "The discussion of clinico-molecular informatics as implemented in a specific patient case was a nice addition to our Molecular Pathways in Clinical Trials symposium."

About the SWOG Clinical Trials Network

SWOG is one of the five cooperative groups that together comprise the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) National Clinical Trials Network. The group designs and conducts multidisciplinary clinical trials to improve the practice of medicine in preventing, detecting and treating cancer, and to enhance the quality of life for cancer survivors. The more than 4,000 researchers in the group's network practice at more than 500 institutions, including 22 of the NCI-designated cancer centers as well as cancer centers in almost a dozen other countries. Formerly the Southwest Oncology Group, SWOG is headquartered at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and has an operations office in San Antonio and a statistical center in Seattle. Learn more at www.swog.org.

About MolecularHealth

MolecularHealth, Inc., a clinico-molecular informatics company, is advancing precision medicine by translating patient-specific molecular and genomic data, clinical history and published scientific and medical evidence into safer, more effective drug choices for patients. The company's solutions range from a next generation drug safety assessment and prediction tool that analyzes the molecular basis of adverse events to a treatment decision support system that transforms genome sequences into evidence-based treatment strategies for cancer patients. Backed by the co-founder and former chairman and chief executive officer of SAP, Dietmar Hopp, through dievini Hopp BioTech, MolecularHealth maintains offices in Basel, Switzerland; Heidelberg, Germany; Houston and New York. The company is led by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, including founding members of Generation Health, LION Bioscience, Model N Life Sciences and Xapien, and a group of scientists and technologists instrumental in the development of data analysis software for the Human Genome Project and clinical IT systems for leading U.S. health systems. MolecularHealth's collaborators include the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

SOURCE MolecularHealth, Inc.