Gilead Sciences and Alphabet company Verily Life Sciences have partnered to identify and understand immunological and molecular drivers of inflammatory diseases.
The three-year collaboration will see Verily deploy its Immunoscape platform to generate insights from Gilead clinical trials.
Verily’s Immunoscape platform will be used to identify and better understand the immunological basis of rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and lupus-related diseases.
The platform integrates immunogenomic phenotyping and advanced computational analysis techniques to profile the molecular characteristics of inflammatory diseases at high resolution.
Gilead will provide clinical data and various immune cell samples from participants before, during and after administration of drugs in the company’s ongoing phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials.
Gilead said this effort may lead to new insights into inflammatory diseases such as identifying molecular signatures that can help physicians in selecting the right therapy or tailored dosing for a specific subgroup of patients. This could improve treatment results and avoid side effects.
Data generated through this collaboration could allow better characterization of subtypes of inflammatory diseases to help scientists identify new molecular targets for new therapies.
Gilead chief scientific officer, research and development head John McHutchison said: “Inflammatory diseases are complex and heterogeneous, and despite treatment advances, most patients experience neither deep nor long-lasting remissions.
“We are excited to be collaborating with the scientists at Verily to accelerate our understanding of these common and serious inflammatory diseases. We hope to ultimately improve patient outcomes using this cutting-edge technology to identify molecular disease pathways that would otherwise remain undetected.”
Verily chief medical officer Jessica Mega said: “With the Immunoscape platform, we are seeking to develop a molecular map of inflammatory diseases that will help us identify and characterize disease mechanisms.”
Verily develops tools and devices to collect, organize and activate health data, and creates interventions to avoid and manage disease.