Rheos Medicines and PatientsLikeMe Announce Strategic Collaboration to Investigate Underlying Metabolic Drivers of Immune-Mediated Disease

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Rheos Medicines, a precision medicine company using insights from immunometabolism to bring novel therapeutics to patients suffering from autoimmune diseases, and PatientsLikeMe, the world's largest integrated community, health management, and real-world data platform, today announced a strategic partnership. The aim of this partnership is to better understand the immunometabolism underlying hard-to-treat immune-mediated diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, using both organizations' patient-centered approach to capture clinical and biological data. This multi-stage collaboration is expected to substantially advance Rheos's precision medicine efforts, supporting the progression of and establishing further proof-of-concept in its integrated technology platform. 

Central to the partnership is the PatientsLikeMe DigitalMe™ biomarker discovery program, a research effort that closely studies the complex drivers of a spectrum of conditions, including autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, in thousands of patients through multi-omics biospecimen analyses. Rheos will incorporate de-identified patient-reported data from PatientsLikeMe along with proteomic, metabolomic, transcriptomic, and genetic data collected from biospecimens from thousands of patients using its proprietary, network-based multi-omics mathematical integration methods. This collaboration is part of Rheos's ongoing efforts to define the patients most likely to respond to therapy and identify novel targets for development associated with participants' diseases. Both companies will communicate the key findings of their analyses to PatientsLikeMe members, as well as more broadly in support of patient care.

"Understanding the underpinnings of diseases through a metabolic lens is critical for the development of interventions that go beyond symptom management to prevent or modify disease progression," said Scott Lipnick, Ph.D., Vice President of Life and Data Science at PatientsLikeMe. "PatientsLikeMe is proud to partner with Rheos Medicines in support of their innovative approaches to characterizing immune-mediated diseases and developing much needed interventions for patients."

PatientsLikeMe will also collaborate with Rheos to access a broader range of patient samples in an attempt to learn more about disease subtype and identify therapeutic targets for further investigation. Given the unprecedented challenges patients are currently navigating and the impacts on the healthcare ecosystem, both companies will focus on developing novel and innovative ways to engage patients. 

"Our strategic collaboration with PatientsLikeMe represents an important opportunity to reach patients while further exploring the metabolic pathways that contribute to factors that promote chronic inflammation," said Barbara Fox, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Rheos Medicines. "Our integrated technology platform has the ability to harness the power of metabolomics to successfully identify the immune cells involved in diseases. This partnership further bolsters our precision medicine approach and supports our ongoing efforts to ensure the right treatment gets to the right patient with minimal side effects."

About PatientsLikeMe 

PatientsLikeMe is the world's largest integrated community, health management, and real-world data platform. On PatientsLikeMe, members can put their disease experiences in context and find answers to their questions. They can easily connect directly with members who have the same conditions, are experiencing the same symptoms, or have used similar treatments. Data generated by members themselves are systemically collected and quantified while also providing an environment for peer support and learning. The site enables members to monitor symptoms of their condition(s), share their disease experiences and treatment outcomes, and learn how to improve their care through peer-to-peer interactions. These data capture the complex temporality and competing influences of different lifestyle choices, socio-demographics, conditions, and treatments on a person's health. Everything members share empowers the community with personal agency, establishing PatientsLikeMe as a clinically robust resource with demonstrated impact, including more than 100 studies in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. For more information, please visit www.patientslikeme.com.  

About Rheos Medicines

Rheos Medicines is a precision medicine company using insights from immunometabolism to bring novel therapeutics to patients suffering from autoimmune diseases. The company's approach elucidates the underlying complexities and heterogeneity of immune mediated disease via a proprietary platform and product engine that integrates multiple "-omic" datasets through a metabolic lens. Rheos systematically defines the biologic links between immune cell metabolism and function across patient subsets, and advances novel biomarker-enabled small molecule therapeutics to bring precision to the treatment of immune-mediated diseases. Rheos was founded by Third Rock Ventures and is located in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please visit www.rheosrx.com.

SOURCE Rheos Medicines