Centene Corp. has agreed to fund up to $100 million of precision medicine research over 10 years at Washington University in St. Louis. Innovations that arise from the initiative will be commercialized through the ARCH Personalized Medicine Initiative, a joint venture between the School of Medicine and Centene.
Publicly traded Centene is multinational healthcare company that provides services to government-sponsored and commercial health plans, focusing on under-insured and uninsured individuals. The partnership is designed to transform and accelerate research into treatments for Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, diabetes and obesity. ARCH is designed to accelerate the development and implementation of affordable and accessible health solutions to the public using the intellectual property developed from this research.
Washington University’s School of Medicine's Personalized Medicine Initiative aims to develop customized disease treatment and prevention for patients. The investment will leverage the university's research and biomedical capabilities, including technologies such as CRISPR, and scientists in the areas of the microbiome, immunomodulatory therapies, cancer genomics, neurodegeneration, cellular reprogramming, chemical biology, informatics and others.
In addition, the funds will strengthen resources at more than a dozen centers and institutes at the School of Medicine, including the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology; the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs; Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine; the Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Genome Institute; the Institute for Informatics; and the Center of Regenerative Medicine.
"We will be bringing together world-class resources and intellectual horsepower from every basic and clinical scientific discipline to urgently accelerate the timeline for developing therapies that are more precisely targeted, with aspirations to do so in the next five to seven years," said David H. Perlmutter, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean, and the Spencer T. and Ann. W. Olin Distinguished Professor at the School of Medicine, in a prepared statement. "I believe the most important advances that will evolve from the personalized medicine paradigm will come from harnessing genome engineering technologies to build better model systems of each human disease, and utilizing deep genomic and clinical characterization to enable more effective and less expensive clinical trials."
