Monday, May 18, 2015
Helmsley Trust Awards $17.5 Million to Crohn's & Colitis Foundation
The grant will be used to establish an integrated knowledge platform called IBD Plexus, which will centralize and aggregate patient information across multiple research efforts. IBD Plexus will include a biobank; registries to capture clinical, patient-reported, and biosample data; and a data management platform to house, organize, aggregate, and disseminate data for research. Within three years, databases will be combined or built with clinical information about more than forty thousand Crohn's and colitis patients, along with genomic and microbial profiles from seven thousand patients who will be followed over time. CCFA has selected Deloitte Consulting to develop IBD Plexus's big data management and analytics platform and Thermo Fisher Scientific to provide biobanking services.
"We have seen breakthrough discoveries in IBD, but progress toward identifying effective, personalized treatments and potential cures has been slow," said James Lewis, a professor of medicine and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania who led a two-year discovery and planning process to conceptualize and design IBD Plexus. "There is a strong and growing demand from both the medical and patient communities for new therapies that will keep IBD in remission, better tools to help select the right therapy for the right patient, and practical ways to reduce variability in the quality of care for individual patients...."