The Pacific Northwest Research Institute and Indivumed GmbH Announce Strategic Collaboration

SEATTLE and HAMBURG, Germany, August 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Bioinformatics holds the promise of developing personalized treatment for cancer patients

The Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI), located in Seattle, Washington USA and Indivumed GmbH (Indivumed), based in Hamburg, Germany, announced today that they have entered a strategic collaboration led by Dr. David Galas, a world renowned expert in computational biology. The collaboration is designed to harness the power of molecular and clinical cancer data for tailoring successful treatments for individual cancer patients.

Indivumed's global Cancer Database and Biobank contains more than 4.5 million biological data points associated with greater than 600,000 discrete tumor, blood and urine samples obtained from more than 25,000 cancer patients. Indivumed stringently follows highly standardized processes for the collection and preservation of biospecimen samples from cancer patients, which results in the highest quality molecular and clinical datasets.

"Accessing Indivumed's global Cancer Database is a great opportunity for us to better understand how all the pieces of a cancer patient's biology fit together by detecting complex dependencies in this extensive data set." said Dr. Galas. "Understanding the biology of cancer from the patient data will provide invaluable insight into various cancers and how to treat it in the most precise manner."

The Galas Lab will apply its proprietary computational method for deciphering the biological complexity of human development and disease. "The method has been successfully used to analyze a wide variety of data ranging from RNA profiles in patients with autoimmune disease to childhood development," said Dr. Nikita Sakhanenko, Senior Staff Scientist at PNRI. This collaboration will be the first application of the method in cancer.

Dr. Hartmut Juhl, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Indivumed commented that "allowing David's extremely innovative analytical platform to survey our Cancer Database will enable Indivumed and collaborative research partners to better understand the complexity of cancer and to translate their specific targets and biomarkers in the context of the clinical world of cancer. Overall, we hope to get closer to the development of a true precision medicine for cancer patients."

About Indivumed: 

INDIVUMED an ISO certified global oncology research company based in Hamburg, Germany, has established the world's leading Cancer Database and biobank, retaining unique patterns of biomolecules such as RNA, DNA, and proteins as they existed in the human body.  This Cancer Database makes possible multi-omics capabilities that will allow for characterization of samples and data such as whole genome gene expression analysis, expression analysis of cancer relevant proteins, expression analysis of cancer relevant phosphoproteins and bioinformatic solutions for integrating molecular, biological and clinical information.

Indivumed's products and services allow for in-depth understanding of the underlying mechanisms of a patient's cancer, addressing important demands in translational research and molecular diagnostics to support implementation of personalized healthcare.

For more information about Indivumed, please visit http://www.indivumed.com

About PNRI 

PNRI is a non-profit, biomedical research institute in Seattle, WA, USA, founded in 1956 by Dr. William Hutchinson with the vision to provide a welcoming place for scientists to independently pursue their research interests. Today, PNRI continues to seek novel ways to prevent, treat and cure human diseases using the latest and most promising technologies. The Institute's team of more than 100 physicians, scientists and technical staff work independently and collaboratively to realize scientific discoveries, generate insight into disease processes, and improve the health of people around the world.

For more information about PNRI, please visit http://www.pnri.org

Indivumed GmbH, Tel.: +49-40-413383-0, E-mail: press@indivumed.com

Pacific Northwest Research Institute, Tel.: +1-206-568-1489 Skype +1-206-568-1489 or +1-206-726-1250 Skype +1-206-726-1250, E-mail: media@pnri.org