Genomics Plc and Our Future Health Collaboration Heralds Exciting Era for Early Disease Diagnosis
The holy grail for better health outcomes is early diagnosis. The combination of genomics and health data are key to achieving that. Two leading initiatives from the UK have now announced an exciting collaboration.
Who Are Genomics Plc and What Is 'Our Future Health'?
Genomics Plc is a pioneering British healthcare company that aims to transform health through the power of genomics. The company was spun out of the University of Oxford in 2014, now employing over 100 people. It uses an extensive data platform and novel analytical tools to enable a prevention-first approach to healthcare by using its powerful risk prediction tools to get more of the right people into the right screening, diagnosis, and treatment pathways for them.
Our Future Health is an innovative health research programme that will put the UK health data collection for research at the forefront of the world. The programme is designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection and treatment of diseases. Our Future Health is collecting and linking multiple sources of health and health-relevant information, including genetic data, across a cohort of five million people in the UK, who are donating their blood for testing and providing other health information, to create a world-leading resource for academic and commercial researchers to undertake discovery research on early indicators of disease.
A Collaboration to Prevent and Treat a Plethora of Diseases
Genomics Plc and Our Future Health have now announced a collaboration to generate polygenic risk scores (PRS) as part of Our Future Health's programme aim to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat common diseases such as dementia, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. PRS enable personalised approaches to disease prevention. PRS tests can identify people at greater elevated risks of diseases such as cancer, heart disease and dementia, that would not otherwise be picked up using routine testing. It can then match patients to the most appropriate prevention, screening or treatment for them, with the aim of preventing disease altogether or catching it early when outcomes are better. Genomics Plc is the global leader in PRS development.
Risks and Benefits
Genetics is a key risk factor for many common diseases. Although mutations in critical genes are often associated with, or can even cause, rare diseases, it is actually only small variations in DNA which add up to affect the risk of someone developing a disease. On their own, each variation can be insignificant, but their combined effects can add up and are measured in a polygenic risk score to give a more accurate prediction of risk. The PRSs can be used independently or can be used in combination with other health data, such as blood test results, in "integrated risk tools".
The examples of the potential benefits are huge. For example, it is estimated that 700,000 people in England could benefit from taking statins to reduce the chance of them getting heart disease, but the current methods do not identify them as being at higher risk. In another example, PRS could identify about 650,000 women in England who are at a moderate or high risk of breast cancer but where this is not currently visible to the NHS (because mammograms are only routinely offered from age 50 and above) and so they are not yet detected as being at high risk.
Personalised medicine is sometimes perceived as more complicated and expensive than more established treatments, but it can actually be a more cost-effective and efficient way to achieve better health outcomes, through effective screening and prevention.
Professor Sir Peter Donnelly, CEO of Genomics plc, said: "Today, millions of people spend many years of their life in poor health and too often we treat diseases only when patients start showing symptoms. Identifying these patients and getting them onto the right prevention, screening, and care pathways can help us to prevent disease or catch it early, allowing the NHS to improve outcomes and use resources more efficiently. We know that polygenic risk scores can be a huge help with this, but for them to be most effective we must learn about how best to use them – the best way to provide them to individuals and doctors, and how to integrate them into current practice most efficiently. This partnership with Our Future Health will enable us to do that, and I am incredibly excited to get started."
Dr Andrew Roddam, CEO at Our Future Health said: "We’re at an exciting moment for Our Future Health as we begin to invite millions of people to join the programme in four regions across the UK. We’re looking forward to working with Genomics plc to explore how PRS could be useful for the volunteers taking part in Our Future Health and in healthcare more widely. This partnership has the potential to teach us more about PRS and its potential role in the prevention and screening of diseases."
UK at Forefront of Exciting New Era
At the 2021 PING Conference, which VWV held in collaboration with IQVIA, entitled 'UK Life Sciences Opportunities in a Changed World', we heard from Professor Sir Peter Donnelly, and at the 2022 PING Conference entitled "The Golden Age for Life Sciences Innovation", Andrew Roddam spoke on the exciting Our Future Health programme. Both of them inspired the audience with the potential for the importance of genomic and health data, and showed how the UK is leading the world in both elements.
It is really exciting to see this collaboration and the difference that personalised medicine in action can bring. We look forward to hearing more about progress.