Orion Bionetworks is a multi-institution cooperative alliance that is unlocking the power of shared data and predictive modeling to help transform our understanding of diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and accelerate the search for cures.
Accelerated Cure Project for MS (ACP) is working closely with other leading organizations in patient care, computational modeling and translational research participating in the alliance, including the Institute for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, GNS Healthcare, MetaCell, and PatientsLikeMe. As part of Orion Bionetworks, ACP has access to the combined datasets and expertise of all members of the alliance and is receiving support from Orion to undertake data-mining activities in search of new knowledge that will lead to improved treatments and cures for MS and related disorders.
Orion Bionetworks is a program of the Marin Community Fund, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, and is funded by Janssen Research & Development, LLC, a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company, which has provided a $5.4 million scientific sponsorship as part of its Healthy Minds program for the first phase of this effort. Initially, this cooperative alliance will focus on integrating clinical, biomarker and imaging data with rich real-world patient data from existing, independent databases of over 7,000 people with MS into a causal computational disease model.
ACP is contributing to the alliance its expertise in MS and experience with its innovative approach to highly collaborative research in MS and related disorders. Additionally, it is providing extensive clinical and epidemiological data from over 3,000 participants in the ACP Repository program along with the almost 300 million molecular data points returned, to date, to the Repository database from the many academic and industrial research groups that have undertaken research with the Repository’s biosamples and data.
Complex diseases such as MS require novel research approaches and large scale collaborations. The ACP Repository serves as an outstanding resource for MS research. By contributing this resource to Orion Bionetworks, we enable the alliance to generate extremely useful insights into this complicated disease.
Additional information on the Orion Bionetworks and partnership opportunities is available on the organization’s website, www.orionbionetworks.org.
