A spinoff from Utah-based Intermountain Health has raised $10 million to bring longitudinal biological and clinical data to biopharmaceutical companies.
Culmination Bio says it maintains exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and biospecimen data. This extensive data lake can enable biopharmaceutical companies to gain insights critical to facilitating diagnostic and therapeutic development.
The company notes that it can take over a decade and billions of dollars to obtain regulatory approval for treatments or diagnostic tools. The problem starts with getting access to longitudinal biological and clinical patient data, which can take life sciences and biotech companies months to collect and process.
With a continuously growing library of over 5 million de-identified patient samples and clinical data spanning decades, Culmination Bio can offer rapid access to retrospective patient data and faster access to thousands of prospective patients for studies.
The $10 million investment is from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures.
"With support from our investors, Culmination Bio is raising the bar for healthcare innovation,” said Lincoln Nadauld, M.D., Ph.D., president and CEO of Culmination Bio, in a statement. He was previously vice president, chief of precision health & academics at Intermountain.
“On top of our existing longitudinal patient data, we are adding over 300,000 biospecimens to our data lake each year,” Nadauld added. “Because of this, we have the ability to quickly identify unique patient cohorts from our vast data lake that can speed up critical research, leading to novel discoveries..”
In addition to speeding up patient recruitment, the new company said the platform offers quick query capabilities across genomic, biological, clinical, and claims data, which has already supported research on everything from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery.
“Culmination’s Intelligence Platform provides collaborators with access to uniquely rich de-identified clinical datasets,” said David M. Rubin, Ph.D., managing director at Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (GHIF), in a statement. “GHIF looks forward to working with the talented and experienced Culmination management team to harness the power of precision medicine to improve outcomes for patients.”
