Amgen, Merck back Culmination Bio's patient data intelligence platform

Intermountain Health spinoff Culmination Bio has secured $10 million in funding from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures. The company said it is building "the largest disease-agnostic patient data intelligence platform" to help biopharmaceutical companies gain insights for the development of diagnostics and therapeutics. 

The spinoff noted that it has exclusive rights to a physical library and a cloud-based data lake covering more than 40 years of anonymised patient electronic health records and biospecimen data. "On top of our existing longitudinal patient data, we are adding over 300,000 biospecimens to our data lake each year," CEO Lincoln Nadauld said, adding that this allows the company to "quickly identify unique patient cohorts from our vast data lake that can speed up critical research, leading to novel discoveries."

Accelerates patient recruitment

Culmination Bio explained it can take life sciences and biotech companies months to collect and process longitudinal biological and clinical patient data. By partnering with Culmination Bio, firms can quickly gain access to retrospective patient data and thousands of prospective patients to conduct studies. The platform also features rapid query capabilities across genomic, biological, clinical, and claims data, which the company said has already supported research on areas ranging from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery.

According to Culmination Bio, it plans to use the funding to further develop its intelligence platform and expand its commercial growth. 

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