Broad Institute Partners with Datavant to Scale Clinico-Genomic Research by Connecting Health Data

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 12, 2022 —  The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Broad), a leader in advancing human health through genomic research, and Datavant, the leader in helping organizations securely connect health data, today announce a long-term collaboration to scale clinico-genomic registries across rare and common diseases with unmet medical needs.

Broad has built a novel direct-to-patient research platform that enables researchers to directly engage patients in genomic research. Researchers can contact patients via social media platforms and other digital channels to recruit and consent those patients into studies.

Broad will collect the patient’s consent and sequence the patient’s whole genome. Datavant will leverage its vast network of more than 15,000 clinics, 2,200 hospitals, and numerous third-party partners to retrieve complete medical records for consented patients

Combining clinical data and genomic data will help researchers:

• Identify genes that cause disease, which can aid development of new drugs
• Identify subtypes of established diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart failure, which may help explain different responses to existing therapies
• Discover, characterize and define new rare diseases

Additionally, using Datavant’s secure health data connectivity platform, Broad will be able to de-identify and connect registries to more than 500 real-world data partners including those with additional labs, insurance claims, mortality data, and social determinants of health, that can power the next generation of disease insights and cures.

“Combining the power of whole genome sequencing with patients’ complete medical records will join the richness of genetic data with the depth of a patient’s entire clinical history,” said Clare Bernard, Head of the Data Sciences Platform at Broad. “This collaboration will help us accelerate our mission of advancing the understanding of disease by scaling the availability of clinico-genomic data sets, which has been historically fraught with hurdles.”

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Broad,” said Claire Cravero, Head of Public Sector at Datavant. “Historically genomic research is a bespoke fragmented effort that is stymied by cost barriers and data connectivity challenges. This collaboration has the potential to make this rich data available at scale in a privacy compliant way and solve these longstanding challenges.”

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.