Mayo Clinic, Thermo Fisher partner to create biomedical database

Dive Brief:

• Mayo Clinic and Thermo Fisher Scientific have founded Precure, a company focused on creating one of the world’s leading biomedical datasets.
• The company, which Mayo Clinic unveiled last week, will use molecular data generated from one million biospecimens, clinical information and other resources to create the dataset.
• Thermo Fisher, a minority owner, will provide proteomics and mass spectrometry expertise and products to Precure to support work on the multi-omics dataset.

Dive Insight:

Mayo Clinic launched Precure Research in July to find and understand early signals of disease. Through the investigator-led scientific effort, Mayo Clinic is analyzing data on genes, proteins, metabolites, clinical records, wearable devices and environmental exposures to uncover changes that precede the presence of clinical symptoms. 

Precure could complement the research initiative. The company will provide the scale, infrastructure and collaborations needed to generate population-scale molecular data, Mayo Clinic said. Precure’s remit extends to helping to use the data to create new diagnostics, therapies and other healthcare products.

Mayo Clinic, which is Precure’s majority owner, is providing clinical data and expertise. Precure plans to link longitudinal clinical information collected over several years to data generated from biospecimens. Using artificial intelligence and large-scale data analytics, the startup could identify patterns in complex datasets and translate them into actionable insights, Mayo Clinic said.

“Precure LLC has the potential to create a step change in how we generate and apply multi-omics data to improve human health,” Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper said in a statement. “We can create new opportunities at unprecedented scale to detect disease earlier, accelerate drug development and enable more precise therapies.”

Mayo Clinic started the Precure prospective study in January. With funding from drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Mayo Clinic plans to enroll up to 100,000 people to test biospecimens, such as blood, urine, saliva and stool. Participants will provide voice recordings and complete surveys. Mayo Clinic has allocated up to five years for building a comprehensive, multi-omics and phenotype dataset.

Thermo Fisher has a history of working with Mayo Clinic. In 2021, the organizations partnered to accelerate the clinical validation of next-generation sequencing, mass spectrometry and immunology diagnostic tools.