IU Partnership Targets Precision Medicine

The Regenstrief Institute has the longest operating EMR system in the world.

Indiana University, the Regenstrief Institute and Indianapolis-based LifeOmic are partnering on an effort to advance personalized medicine. As part of the collaboration, LifeOmic, founded by noted Indianapolis entrepreneur Don Brown, will have a blanket license for a broad range of intellectual property owned by IU and Regenstrief.

The company will also have access to IU faculty for its work in precision medicine and data analytics. In exchange, IU and Regenstrief will have a minority equity position in LifeOmic.

The partnership will address an emerging challenge in the field of genomics: analyzing and storing vast volumes of data and incorporating it into health providers’ decisions about diagnoses and treatments. IU and Regenstrief scientists will work with LifeOmic to develop a platform to store data for millions of patients that can be accessed by researchers and providers from throughout the state.

The collaboration will also allow IU and Regenstrief to work with LifeOmic on other projects that would normally require individual negotiations. 

"The problems and challenges we are facing in health care today are too big to be solved by any one institution," said IU Associate Vice President of Research Anantha Shekhar. "To make progress, we must collaborate with other universities and with private industry across multiple fields. My vision is to forge more industry partnerships like this with minimal bureaucratic barriers to collaborations, so we can tap into the expertise we need to serve patients in Indiana and elsewhere."