GE Healthcare, SOPHiA To Collaborate on Cancer Care

GE Healthcare and SOPHiA GENETICS have announced plans to work together on advancing cancer care, with the goal of better targeting and matching treatments to each patient’s genomic profile and cancer type, helping to ensure the most effective and personalized treatment.

To that end, the companies aim to develop new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics and workflow solutions to serve both the clinical and biopharma markets. The companies will deploy GE Healthcare’s extensive medical imaging and monitoring capabilities and Edison platform-enabled data aggregation with the SOPHiA DDM™ cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics genomic insights platform and related solutions, which are available in more than 750 hospitals, laboratories and biopharma companies.

What the partnership entails

A statement explained that GE Healthcare has deep expertise in clinical workflows, deep learning AI algorithms for image reconstruction and image segmentation, analytics and standardization, while SOPHiA GENETICS, a Swiss firm, is a pioneer in data-driven medicine. 

“Their cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics platform uses AI and machine learning to generate actionable insights for clinicians and researchers from complex multimodal datasets. The companies aim to break down the data silos across instruments and sites that so often delay or even prevent patients from getting the most appropriate treatment both in cancer and in other diseases,” a statement said.

SOPHiA’s platform is flexible and customizable for different labs and hospitals. The company says its platform is being used by more than 1,000 healthcare institutions around the world, with the technology being deployed to help guide treatment plans and identify biomarkers and appropriate patients for clinical trials.

It was reported that the two companies’ combined solution will give healthcare providers and biopharmaceutical companies access to cancer patients’ electronic health records, lab test results, genomic sequencing data and information collected by connected medical devices all in one centralized location.

“The integration of genomics-based artificial intelligence into oncology workflow solutions would be a major breakthrough for integrated cancer medicine and for future clinical research, which increasingly depend on the ability to select those patients most likely to respond to new therapies,” said Jan Makela, President and CEO, Imaging at GE Healthcare.

The partnership between the two companies is quite a big deal because of the central role that complex data sets that include genomic data play in cancer care and diagnostics.

“Cancer patients will be able to receive equal access to better diagnoses and treatments through secure data pooling and knowledge sharing, unlocking the promise of data-driven medicine at scale,” SOPHiA co-founder and CEO Jurgi Camblong said.

The financial aspects of the agreement have not been revealed.

What SOPHiA has been up to

The agreement comes only a couple of days after SOPHiA filed a $100 million IPO.

Prior to the IPO, SOPHiA had raised at least $251 million in private equity. Last October, the company closed a $110 million Series F round.

The money from the Series F round was set to be used to expand SOPHiA’s technological capabilities. 

Earlier this year, SOPHiA announced that it had entered into a long-term collaboration agreement with Hitachi to bring clinical, genomic and real-world insights to healthcare providers, pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies and extend the democratization of Data-Driven Precision Medicine globally for the benefit of patients. 

Under the agreement, the two companies said they would advance data-driven precision medicine through global commercial expansion and development of Hitachi’s digital healthcare solutions and the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform.

Last year, MGI, part of the global genomics leader BGI Group, announced an agreement with SOPHiA GENETICS to provide MGI’s customers access to the SOPHiA Platform for data analysis and interpretation. 

Also in 2020, Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, announced a collaboration with SOPHiA to bring access to the universal SOPHiA Platform for advanced genomic analysis to Twist’s customers, providing the analysis and interpretation of sequencing information.