Avera Health and Sema4 Announce Collaboration to Advance Precision Oncology Care
August 11 2021 - 8:00AM
Avera Health, an integrated regional health care system that serves
300 locations across the Upper Midwest, and Sema4, a
patient-centered health intelligence company, today announced a new
collaboration launching a precision medicine initiative. This
initiative will initially focus on advancing oncology care,
enabling Avera Health’s providers and patients to benefit from
data-driven insights that inform targeted cancer treatments.
Avera Cancer Institute has had a robust precision oncology
program for several years in which the patient’s tumor has been
genetically sequenced to guide individualized cancer treatment.
This collaboration will take that a step further by leveraging
Centrellis®, Sema4’s health intelligence platform, to curate,
structure and integrate clinical and genomic data to support both
cancer research and clinical care at Avera Health. Sema4 will
deliver predictive disease network models and clinically actionable
insights, empowering Avera Health’s providers to further improve
the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer for their
patients. Sema4 will also offer digital tools, which give Avera
Health’s providers the ability to readily search for cohorts of
patients based on clinical criteria, view a patient’s treatment
history that is contained in the curated data as an interactive
timeline, and more systematically match patients to clinical
trials.
“Avera Health has a longstanding commitment to genomics and
personalized medicine, and a forward- thinking approach to
understand the critical role it plays in generating better health
outcomes,” said John Lee, MD, FACS, Chief Medical Officer for
Cancer Research at the Avera Cancer Institute. “Our collaboration
with Sema4, and the resulting access to curated and structured
real-time oncology data, will allow our providers to leverage
cutting-edge tools that will improve the delivery and quality of
cancer care. This access to increasingly rich clinical data
throughout the patient journey will also accelerate critical,
lifesaving treatment options.”
The collaboration between Avera Health and Sema4 significantly
builds upon Avera Health’s existing clinical genomic offerings, led
by the Molecular and Experimental Medicine team, Avera Institute
for Human Genetics, the Avera Cancer Research team, and its
dedicated physicians and genetic counseling clinical team. “Avera’s
providers and researchers have worked tirelessly to develop and
collaborate with like-minded partners on innovative clinical trials
and strategies to provide the right drugs to each and every patient
that entrusts us with their care,” said Casey Williams, PharmD,
Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Research at Avera Health. “In
time, thousands of patients across our six cancer centers, 40
outreach sites, and 37 hospitals will have access to the insights
and offerings generated from this collaboration.”
“Avera Health is an outstanding health system with a proven
history of excellence and innovation in personalized care and
research,” said Michelle Zimmerman, JD, MBA, General Manager of
Oncology Solutions and Emerging Markets at Sema4. “We are pleased
to use our deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data science,
and genomic sequencing to further enable precision oncology care
for Avera Health’s patients. We look forward to a successful,
wide-ranging collaboration advancing numerous clinical and research
initiatives across the Avera Health system.”
As part of their work together, Avera Health will also utilize
Sema4’s industry-leading, information-driven genomic solutions.
More Avera patients will be able to receive genomic testing earlier
in their disease timeline to help oncologists choose the best
chemotherapy treatment regimens, based on the individual’s genomic
data and genetic mutations that have taken place within the tumor,
and the individual’s hereditary risks. They will have access to
Sema4 Signal Whole Exome Sequencing (WES), Whole Transcriptome
Sequencing (WTS), and Hereditary Cancer testing to provide
clinically actionable information about a broad range of genomic
variants across the tumor and germline.
“Our collaboration with Avera Health will accelerate
discoveries, which help oncologists provide optimized care to
individual cancer patients in real time,” said William K. Oh, MD,
Chief Medical Science Officer at Sema4. “Avera Health shares our
vision to use clinicogenomic data to improve patients' lives.”
About the Avera HealthThe Avera Health system
has over 19,000 employees and physicians, serving more than 300
locations and 100 communities in a five-state region. Our ministry,
our people and our superior value distinguish Avera. We carry on
the health care legacy of the Benedictine and Presentation Sisters,
delivering care in an environment guided by our values of
compassion, hospitality and stewardship. For more information about
Avera, visit our website at Avera.org. Learn more in our
newsroom.
About Sema4Sema4 is a
patient-centered health intelligence company dedicated to advancing
healthcare through data-driven insights. Sema4 is transforming
healthcare by applying AI and machine learning to multidimensional,
longitudinal clinical and genomic data to build dynamic models of
human health and defining optimal, individualized health
trajectories. Centrellis®, our innovative health intelligence
platform, is enabling us to generate a more complete understanding
of disease and wellness and to provide science-driven solutions to
the most pressing medical needs. Sema4 believes that patients
should be treated as partners, and that data should be shared for
the benefit of all. For more information, please
visit sema4.com and connect with Sema4 on Twitter,
LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
Sema4 Media Contact:Radley
Mossradley.moss@sema4.com
Avera Health Media Contact:Michelle
PellmanMichelle.pellman@avera.org
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