PrecisionLife and the Metrodora Institute have announced a collaboration to accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of a range of complex chronic diseases.
The partnership will focus on conditions including long COVID, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Sjögren’s syndrome.
Currently affecting about 15 million people in England, chronic or long-term conditions persist, are long-lasting in their effects, or are diseases that come with time. Often, the term ‘chronic’ is applied when the disease lasts for longer than three months.
There is currently no cure for these types of conditions, which tend to be managed with drugs and other treatments.
The partnership, which builds on PrecisionLife’s insights into the mechanisms that drive over 50 complex, chronic conditions, aims to offer hope to a community of patients who have been undeserved and improve patient outcomes.
As part of the deal, both partners aim to first develop and validate genotypic diagnostics to provide clinicians with an accurate view of patients’ risk of disease. Using molecular profiling of underlying disease mechanisms, effective prescribing decisions and drug discovery opportunities will be reported back to clinicians.
The first products to be developed as part of the collaborations will be in long COVID, the symptoms of COVID-19 that persist and continue to develop, and ME/CFS, a condition that causes extreme tiredness and a range of other symptoms.
The partnership aims to extend to the identification and clinical validation of safe and effective drug repurposing candidates that are associated with disease-modifying mechanisms.
In addition, the collaboration will accelerate the approval of effective new personalised treatments for patients.
Rohit Gupta, chief scientific officer at Metrodora, said: “We’ve gone far too long without providing clinicians and patients with an informative readout of the biological drivers associated with these conditions.
“We will work to rapidly establish this new class of genotypic diagnostic tools paired with targeted clinical trials at Metrodora.”
Steve Gardner, chief executive officer at PrecisionLife, said that the collaboration “will transform the rate at which both new diagnostics and effective therapies can be clinically validated and provided to patient communities that are massively underserved, improving health for millions of people”.