Alexion,Sema4 Partner In Rare Disease Diagnostics And Systems Biology

(RTTNews) - Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ALXN) and Sema4 announced a strategic partnership to leverage their shared experience in data science and systems biology to accelerate rare disease diagnosis and therapeutic discovery. This new partnership will combine Alexion's rare disease SmartPanel analytics with Sema4's proven success in next-generation sequencing and genomic interpretation to further enable novel diagnostic and therapeutic insights into rare diseases.

Alexion and Sema4 will also collaborate in searching for and decoding rare disease "genomic shields" - a buffering mechanism that enables patients with a known disease-causing mutation in their genome to resist the manifestation of the disease.

Under the partnership, Alexion will share, research, and further refine the SmartPanel, which Sema4 will leverage to optimize the design of next-generation sequencing solutions and accelerate the interpretation of genomic and phenotypic data. Both parties will combine expertise in data science and bioinformatics to decode the network biology of target systems and research the decoding of genomic shields.