GNS Healthcare and Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation Enter Precision Medicine Collaboration

Rare Daily Staff

GNS Healthcare and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation said they have established a five-year partnership to leverage the organization’s patient registry data from the MMRF CoMMpass Study to create models that can better determine the optimal treatment for individual patients.

GNS Healthcare uses artificial intelligence to develop in silico patients from real world and clinical data to reveal the complex system of interactions underlying disease progression and drug response. 

Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells. In multiple myeloma, malignant plasma cells accumulate in bone marrow—the soft, spongy tissue at the center of your bones—crowding out the normal plasma cells that help fight infection. These malignant plasma cells then produce an abnormal antibody called M protein, which offers no benefit to the body and may cause tumors, kidney damage, bone destruction and impaired immune function.

The collaboration will address key questions for multiple myeloma patients, including identifying subtypes of aggressive disease progression and drivers of patient response to an increasing array of therapeutics, including emerging immunotherapies such as CAR-T cell therapy.  

“The mission of the MMRF is to cure each and every multiple myeloma patient. With a highly diverse patient population, we need a critical mass of high-quality, longitudinal patient data to achieve that mission,” said Paul Giusti, president and CEO of the MMRF. “But data by itself doesn’t generate the insights needed to change patient outcomes. This collaboration with GNS will maximize the insights we can extract from CoMMpass data to address questions most critical to patients and the multiple myeloma community.”

Colin Hill, CEO and co-founder of GNS Healthcare, said the MMRF work and collaboration will help unravel the drivers of multiple myeloma and “better simulate which treatments will lead to better outcomes for which patients – getting at the crux of precision medicine in practice.”

Photo: Colin Hill, CEO of co-founder of GNS Healthcare