First-in-kind Singapore study to deliver insights into heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases
BC Platforms (BCP), a global leader in healthcare data management and analytics, today announced it has been selected as the platform of choice to analyse and manage data collected from the Health for Life in Singapore (HELIOS) study, which forms part of the SG100K data set for Singapore’s National Precision Medicine programme.
The HELIOS study is a state-of-the-art population cohort study established and led by the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore). The population study aims to identify environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors that cause heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases in Singapore.
As part of Singapore’s SG100K study, the HELIOS study will recruit up to 50,000 men and women, aged 30-84 years old, from the Singapore population progressively over the next two years. BCP will be providing BC|INSIGHT and BC|RQUEST for management of LKCMedicine’s genotype and phenotype patient data from a large Asian cohort in a safe and secure manner.
Bringing access to the HELIOS-SG100K data through BC platforms will enable and accelerate researchers to pursue key questions around precision health and personalised medicine.
Nino da Silva, Deputy Managing Director, BC Platforms, said, “I’m delighted that we have more good news coming out of Singapore, a major focus for deploying our clinical solutions and driving precision medicine, where we are working with leading Asian healthcare institutions. This latest partnership should make it easier for health service providers to determine optimal patients treatment pathways in major diseases areas, based on population health insights using our genomic data management platform. Asia’s rich multi-ethnicity is of great value for life science research and clinical decision making.”
NTU LKCMedicine’s Professor John Chambers, Lead Investigator of SG100K, said, “The unique and extensive measurements and samples collected, together with long term follow-up will enable the investigation of the complex interrelationships between environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors on subsequent disease risk. The HELIOS study will thus provide a powerful resource for medical research across a wide range of disciplines for both the current and future generations of biomedical researchers. We’re delighted to have selected BC Platforms as a key delivery partner in this important healthcare project.”
“BC Platforms provides an environment to bring researchers to the data, allowing them to analyse deidentified data in a safe and secure manner,” explained NTU LKCMedicine’s Assistant Professor Marie Loh. “Establishing this Trusted Research Environment is a key step in enabling researchers to use the data to investigate the pathways underlying health and disease in Singapore.”
BC Platforms has been steadily building up its presence in Asia, as part of its mission to deliver industry-leading management and analytics capacity for Genomics and Clinical data in Asia and around the world. Singapore is the fastest growing market in Asia, with strong governmental commitment to facilitate genomics related research and innovation using genomic and clinical data. Asian real-world data is under-represented in global life science research. Through BCP’s collaborations in the region with national healthcare systems the company is enabling researchers to have secure access to good quality, carefully curated, data from Asia, to help build novel medical diagnostics and treatments.
The project will benefit from BCP’s latest software solution called the ‘Trusted Collaboration Environment’ (TCE) and the recent upgraded to its acclaimed BC|INSIGHT open platform version 7. The platform has a high focus on user experience, it is fully equipped with cohort building tools and capabilities to automate data release approval processes and highly dynamic open workspaces. TCEs are built on the foundation of a Trusted Research Environment (TRE), a secure computing environment that manages sensitive patient data while allowing access for researchers. TCEs are increasingly vital tools in enabling international collaborative research as they enable multiple data partners to securely share Real-World Data (RWD).
