GNS Healthcare Inc. (GNS), the leading healthcare data analytics company focused on enabling personalized medicine to improve human health, announced that it has entered into a collaboration with CHDI Foundation, Inc. (CHDI) to create a data-driven computer model of Huntington’s disease (HD), a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder for which there are currently no effective therapies. Created using GNS’s supercomputer-driven REFS (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) platform, the aim is to help researchers discover novel therapies for the disease.
“GNS will apply its big data analytics platform to create a disease-specific computer model that will yield a powerful new resource to the Huntington’s disease research community—with the ultimate aim of better outcomes for patients,” said GNS Executive Vice President and Co-Founder Dr. Iya Khalil. “This collaboration with CHDI is representative of our focus on using big data analytics to reveal new insights into a disease and provide tools for scientists that will help transform the tremendous amount of information coming from new technologies such as next-generation sequencing into predictive computer models of disease progression and drug response. This project serves as a model for future projects focused on other challenging, complex and orphan diseases.”
“While the cause of Huntington’s disease is known, there are currently no effective treatments for this devastating disorder. CHDI’s research efforts focus on understanding the underlying biology of HD in order to discover treatments that slow disease progression,” said Dr. Keith Elliston, Vice President of Systems Biology at CHDI. “The HD model that GNS is building will allow researchers to perform simulations that generate novel hypotheses to help drive this understanding. As such, this collaboration between CHDI and GNS represents an innovative, complementary approach to advancing discoveries that we hope will lead to novel therapies.”
Under the collaboration, GNS will employ the REFS platform to reverse engineer network models from genomic, expression and cell signaling data. Results from millions of in silico simulations of the REFS models will provide new insights into the fundamental mechanisms of Huntington’s disease, enabling the development of more effective treatments. Upon completion, the REFS network models will be transferred to CHDI and its affiliated researchers, allowing the HD research community to utilize the models on an ongoing basis.
Date: August 14, 2012
Source: GNS Healthcare Inc.
Filed Under: Drug Discovery