Culmination Bio Signs Research Collaboration with Merck to Leverage Powerful Disease Agnostic Patient Data Platform

Culmination Bio, a data and technology company combining clinical and biospecimen data, announced an R&D collaboration with Merck, known as MSD, outside the United States and Canada, initially in the area of autoimmune disease.

“Our collaboration with Merck represents a significant milestone in our mission to accelerate healthcare research,” said Lincoln Nadauld, MD, Ph.D., president and CEO of Culmination Bio. “This agreement exemplifies the need for rapid access to high-quality longitudinal patient data spanning decades to inform clinical research.”

Under the terms of the master agreement, Merck will have access to both clinical (Electronic Health Records, labs, medications) and paired biospecimen (tissue and blood) data from several cohorts of various sizes and qualifications. This project-based collaboration leverages Culmination’s unique ability to build both retrospective and prospective deidentified multi-modal datasets in a disease-defined fashion.

As a spinoff from Intermountain Health, Culmination Bio maintains exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and paired biospecimen data. This data speeds recruitment for pharmaceutical research dramatically. Its repository of over five million de-identified patient samples is continuously growing by over 300,000 samples a year, which helps companies with rapid research queries. Its partnership with Intermountain Health also expedites the recruitment of thousands of prospective patients for clinical trials by tapping into its patient network across hundreds of facilities.

Beyond accelerating patient recruitment, the platform empowers researchers with rapid query capabilities across a spectrum of genomic, biological, clinical, and claims data. This versatility has already fueled groundbreaking research ranging from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery published in peer-reviewed journals.

November 2023, Culmination Bio announced an investment from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (Merck GHIF) and Amgen Ventures, which was used to further develop its database and expand its commercial growth with pharmaceutical partners.

To learn more about partnerships with Culmination Bio, visit culmination.com

About Culmination Bio:
Culmination Bio is changing the world by discovering better health. We provide unparalleled value to healthcare organizations by unlocking biological data and enriching it with clinical, claims, and genomic data. We are on a journey to radically improve everyone’s future healthcare experience. Culmination Bio will become the trusted source for healthcare insights and generating discoveries that improve people’s lives.

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Melissa Mowery

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