NEW YORK – Evotec said Tuesday that it has formed a partnership with Hannover Medical School in Germany to build a molecular database for patients with Sjögren's syndrome and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Financial terms were not disclosed.
The medical school will collect biospecimens from hundreds of patients with Sjögren's or SLE, then Evotec will analyze the samples on its PanOmics platform, which integrates genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and single-cell sequencing technologies. After adding patient information from other sources, the partners will build a dataset on Hamburg, Germany-based Evotec's E.MPD platform for storing translational molecular data.
Evotec said that this is the first application of E.MPD for autoimmune diseases.
Under terms of the partnership, Hannover Medical School will have access to the data via Evotec's PanHunter artificial intelligence-based bioinformatics analysis software. The technology vendor will retain exclusive commercial rights to this multiomic dataset, however.
"The conventional symptomatic description of many diseases stands in the way of both diagnosis and effective treatment. By leveraging PanOmics data, we are taking a deeper dive into underlying disease mechanisms," Evotec CSO Cord Dohrmann said in a statement. "A better understanding of molecular disease mechanisms guides the identification of key disease drivers and ultimately supports the identification of new targets and the development of effective medicine."
Torsten Witte, chief of rheumatology and immunology at Hannover Medical School, said that this dataset will help with the quest to discover inflammatory pathways related to the two diseases.
"So far, there are no efficacious anti-inflammatory therapies for Sjögren’s syndrome and only few for SLE," Witte said. "Since these pathways may differ inter-individually, the research project by [the school] and Evotec may even pave the road to individualized treatments of Sjögren’s syndrome and SLE."