Indy startup partners with Komen Tissue Bank

INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — An Indianapolis-based health tech startup has announced a partnership with the Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank in Indy. LifeOmic, which has developed the Precision Health Cloud platform, says the partnership will help to improve breast cancer research.

LifeOmic says the tissue bank, which is located at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, will use the PHC for genomic, clinical and imaging data aggregation and analysis. It will also use the PHC’s healthcare compliant survey capabilities.

The Komen Tissue Bank has what is called the Virtual Tissue Bank, from which researchers can find the medical history of tissue donors, request tissue and download existing data. However, the current system does not support genomic data. The partners say they will work together to deploy the Virtual Tissue Bank onto the PHC’s secure platform.

“The Precision Health Cloud was created to break down silos that exist between current systems, to help advance precision health,” Dr. Don Brown, founder and chief executive officer of LifeOmic, said in a news release. “We are thrilled to partner with the Komen Tissue Bank because of our shared goal to break down silos and help its mission to end breast cancer by enabling advanced research using PHC.”

LifeOmic says the combined system will benefit breast cancer researchers throughout the world. 

“We are passionate about sharing our research resources with scientists worldwide,” said Jill Henry, chief operating officer of the Komen Tissue Bank at the IU Simon Cancer Center. “Using LifeOmic’s PHC will expand the Virtual Tissue Bank’s capabilities to help fuel ongoing treatment and prevention discovery.”