Boehringer Ingelheim and Lifebit partner on data, analytics for drug discovery

GERMANY – Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading research-driven biopharmaceutical company, and Lifebit Biotech, Ltd, a precision medicine software company, have announced a partnership in which Lifebit will assist Boehringer Ingelheim in building a scalable data, analytics, and infrastructure platform within its IT environment.

“This platform will play an important part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s broader strategy to capture translational disease insights from large external healthcare biobanks and ultimately to accelerate the development of innovative medicines,” commented Dr. Jan Nygaard Jensen, SVP and global Head of Computational Biology and Digital Sciences at Boehringer Ingelheim.

Lifebit’s transformational solutions and services will include data source and type standardization, data curation, identifying data and services that can be migrated to the cloud, and federating data connectivity with third parties.

A key component of this collaboration is Lifebit’s CloudOS platform, which is used by a growing number of research organizations and governments around the world, including Genomics England and The Hong Kong Genome Project.

Lifebit’s CloudOS platform’s federated architecture securely brings analytics and computing tools to the data rather than moving sensitive data around.

This has the potential to unlock the transformative value of biomedical data by allowing seamless integration with world-class population genomics and disease-focused cohorts.

Another significant advantage of Lifebit’s CloudOS will be the provision of powerful analytic capabilities and global biobank connections in order to create a secure “dataland” for analytics and research.

This collaboration builds on a partnership announced in 2021 to use the Lifebit REAL platform to detect the most recent disease outbreaks, including transboundary diseases and emerging pathogens like COVID-19.

“We are thrilled to contribute to Boehringer Ingelheim’s vision of harnessing the power of external biobanks and large-scale clinico-genomic data to transform R&D,” said Lifebit CEO Dr. Maria Chatzou Dunford.

In other news, BioMed X has announced the start of a new brain sensor development research project in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim.

The ‘Advanced Biomarker Detection for Pharmacological Monitoring in the Brain’ (BDB) project’s goal is to develop a continuous monitoring biosensor for the direct detection of small molecule biomarkers in rodent brain tissue.

This will help to accelerate the development of novel treatment approaches in precision psychiatry.

The project is the fifth collaborative research effort between the two companies, who have been working closely together since 2014.

There are currently two projects in lung research and neuroscience that have been completed and are being transferred to Boehringer Ingelheim for further development.