Berg joins Genomics England project to sequence 100,000 genomes
pharmafile | October 2, 2015 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | Berg, Genomics england, artificial intelligence
Boston-based biopharmaceutical company Berg has announced it will join an industry collaboration with Genomics England, with the goal of sequencing 100,000 human genomes and creating a new genomic medicine service for the National Health Service (NHS) by 2017.
Formed by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Genomics England is partnering with innovative health companies like Berg and focusing on patients with rare diseases and six common cancers.
Through the GENE Consortium, Berg will work on an industry trial involving a selection of whole genome sequences across cancer and rare diseases, discovering how best to collaborate with clinicians and researchers. The trial aims to identify the most effective way of bringing industry expertise into the 100,000 Genomes Project in order to realise the potential benefits for patients.
Berg, the namesake of Chairman and Co-founder Carl E. Berg, together with co-founders Mitch Gray and Niven Narain, utilises deep biological profiling and Bayesian artificial intelligence as a foundation to creating the next generation of drugs and diagnostics to improve human health.
Narain, also Berg’s president and chief technology officer, explained to Pharmafile how the collaboration was born of shared values: “We firstly did a collaboration with the US Department of Defense, initially on prostate cancer, which has now extended out and the original introduction was done through one of our current partners, to the head of Genomics England, Paul Jones. When we met, we found the philosophies of the Prime Minister’s initiative and our own had many similarities.”
Berg’s novel platforms and key relationships, including the prostate cancer collaboration, has led to new diagnostic markers for prostate cancer and a bold approach underway on pancreatic cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
Berg aims push on, using its expertise in data-analytics, as well as its proprietary Interrogative Biology Platform in the development of an analytical tool that will be used to process data from the 100,000 Genomes Project.
The company’s BPM 31510 drug has been engineered to battle some of the most deadly cancers, including highly metabolic tumours. Focused on a precision medicine approach to drug discovery, Berg’s approach involves inverting the normal drug development process by creating therapies that match the biology of a disease to produce the right treatment for a specific patient, versus the current one-size-fits-all approach, as Narain explained to Pharmafile.com: “Most companies and most big data approaches today are based on publicly-available data sources, and they are saying ‘here’s the area of the genome or the area of the biology that we’d like to focus in on and how does it operate in a certain disease,’ and this truncates it to a specific area.
“What we’re doing is flipping the entire model upside down and saying we’re not going to make any hypothesis; we’re going to allow big data to drive hypotheses instead of the hypotheses driving big data.”
The announcement is the latest partnership for Berg which,. in addition to the Department of Defense collaboration, has also teamed up with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Parkinson’s Institute, Harvard Medical School, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical College, Stanford University Medical Center, and the Cancer Research And Biostatistics (CRAB) /Pancreatic Cancer Research Team.
Narain adds: “Through our partnership with Genomics England, Berg will use AI-based big data analytics to identify areas in the biology that have been affected by a diseased environment. There will be novel data developed from this project and our goal is to apply Berg’s technology and expertise in advancing the knowledge learned into an actionable benefit back to society. We are both humbled and excited to bring our technologies into the U.K. and greater European Union.”
Joel Levy
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