Nashville Biosciences Collaborates with Datavant to Accelerate Life Sciences Drug Discovery and Clinical Research

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 02, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nashville Biosciences, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) that leverages BioVU_®, the medical center's de-identified biobank to support biopharma research and development, and Datavant, the leader in securely connecting the world's health data, today announced a collaboration. The collaboration will enable biopharma companies to connect their trial data to research datasets from BioVU_®. The linkages will accelerate drug discovery, clinical development, and drug safety activities.

Nashville Biosciences helps life sciences companies answer questions related to drug discovery and health outcomes research by analyzing approximately 3.5 million de-identified electronic medical records, including a subset of approximately 275,000 records that are linked to DNA samples collected under an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved process over the past 15 years.

Datavant will extend these capabilities by enabling life sciences clients to compliantly de-identify and connect their clinical trial and registry data to Nashville Biosciences' rich clinical, genomic, and imaging datasets.

"We are proud of the rich insights we've been able to provide to biopharma companies seeking new druggable targets or striving to understand the natural history of diseases and patient outcomes," said Leeland Ekstrom, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer. "Working with Datavant, we'll be able to go a step further by enabling the creation of even richer datasets to drive innovation all along the biopharma R&D pipeline."

"Clinico-genomic datasets are key to unlocking discoveries of new drug targets and improving outcomes research," said Travis May, Founder, and President of Datavant. "Securely connecting this type of highly nuanced data with data from clinical trials will help unlock a step-change in the speed at which new therapies will be discovered and successfully brought to market."

About Nashville Biosciences

Nashville Biosciences, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), was created to harness the medical center's extensive genomic and bioinformatics resources for drug and diagnostics discovery and development. Leveraging Vanderbilt University Innovationtm, Nashville Biosciences serves as a commercial interface between outside companies and the formidable research capabilities represented by BioVU_®, one of the world's most comprehensive genetic databases linked to de-identified medical records with years of longitudinal clinical data. This unique asset is one of the largest and highest quality of its kind, providing an unprecedented opportunity to guide R&D activity in biotech, pharma, diagnostics, medical devices, and other life sciences applications.

About Datavant

Datavant's mission is to connect the world's health data to improve patient outcomes. Datavant works to reduce the friction of data sharing across the healthcare industry by building technology that protects the privacy of patients while supporting the linkage of patient health records across datasets. Learn more about Datavant at www.datavant.com.

Media Contacts:

Spencer Andrei
Head of Business Development, Nashville Biosciences
[email protected]

Elenee Argentinis
Head of Marketing at Datavant
[email protected]