Merck inks research deal with Culmination Bio to leverage ‘powerful’ patient data platform

The agreement will initially focus in the area of autoimmune disease and give Merck access to Culmination’s clinical records and bio specimen data from several cohorts.

Culmination Bio has exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data entity covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and paired biospecimen data.

This data can be used to ‘dramatically’ speed recruitment for pharmaceutical research.

In addition, its repository of over five million de-identified patient samples is continuously growing by over 300,000 samples a year, which helps companies with rapid research queries.

"Our collaboration with Merck represents a significant milestone in our mission to accelerate healthcare research,” said Lincoln Nadauld, CEO and president of Culmination Bio.

“This agreement exemplifies the need for rapid access to high-quality longitudinal patient data spanning decades to inform clinical research.”

The project-based collaboration leverages Culmination’s unique ability to build both retrospective and prospective deidentified multi-modal datasets in a disease-defined fashion, both companies said in a release.

According to Culmination Bio, the versality of its platform already fueled ‘ground-breaking’ research ranging from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery published in peer-reviewed journals.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.