Open DNA

Precision Medicine is an emerging medical approach to the treatment and prevention of diseases, taking into account the individual differences in the genetics, lifestyle, and medical history of each person. This approach allows physicians and researchers to more accurately predict which prevention strategies and treatment plans for a particular disease will work in which individuals or groups of people. This is in contrast to the existing approach, in which disease treatment and prevention strategies are developed for the average person, with less consideration for the differences between individuals (for example – providing Metformin to all diabetes patients).

This medical approach has been gaining momentum in recent years, mainly due to the entry of genetic analysis, artificial intelligence, cloud technologies, and big data into the medical world. These enable the accumulation of medical data and the creation of large databases, as well as integration and analysis of data from various sources to optimize diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic medicine.

The Need

Every year, nearly 20 million lives are lost to heart attacks. The metabolic syndrome that leads to heart attacks - diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and excess cholesterol, is the number 1 killer on the planet. These diseases are detrimental to the health and quality of life of billions of people worldwide and create high costs for healthcare providers and insurance companies.

However, unlike other diseases, which take their toll on the body over time, heart attacks can kill immediately without any warning signs. They may take time to develop and can be treated, but the symptoms are often undetected, and once it's happened, it is too late.

The good news is that many heart attacks are preventable if their causes are treated by lifestyle changes or medications. The problem is, often the diseases and symptoms that lead to a heart attack are not detected in time or do not receive quality treatment to prevent risk factors.

There is a real and clear need for a technology that can identify risk factors early and optimize treatment for each patient.

The solution - Optimized, personalized genomic-based treatment

Today we know that treating high-risk patients can prevent many heart attacks. The problem is that physicians are limited in their ability to identify high-risk patients since they don’t have access to genetic data. Combining clinical data with genetic data, heart attacks can be predicted with up to 85% accuracy.

OpenDNA has developed a unique AI bioinformatics platform that analyzes genetic and personalized clinical insights, such as risk prediction and recommendations for the best treatment for a specific patient.

The company has already implemented its AI solutions for the cardiometabolic syndrome, and in the future means to apply the technology to other complex polygenic disease states such as cancer, chronic kidney failure, autoimmune, neurological disease, and musculoskeletal disease. 

The Technology

Since CMS, similar to most other chronic disease is affected by a genetic predisposition that is based on the cumulative effects of millions of DNA changes, special technology and research is required to create predictions that pertain to it. OpenDNA’s cloud-based platform can analyze millions of data points of genetic data to create polygenic scores that help analyze the individual genetic architecture of complex polygenic disease together with any type of relevant clinical data. The platform provides simple, actionable, and personalized clinical insights, such as risk predictions, personal recommendations for optimal diabetes or hypertension drugs for each patient. It makes this complex data accessible to any physician without special knowledge in genetics. OpenDNA is using the most advanced genetic algorithms as well as machine learning to provide outstanding results in validation studies. The platform is based on the extensive experience and research by Dr. Evangelos Evangelou, a genetic epidemiologist and co-founder of the company, from the Imperial College of London, UK, and Ioannina University, GR. Dr. Evangelou has published over 20 papers in Nature Genetics and has over 15,000 citations.

Unique benefits:

The OpenDNA developed the system from the ground up to answer the challenges of providing precision genetic medicine for complex diseases. It has several significant unique features:

• Only company to offer patented treatment algorithms as part of solutions (Allowed US Patent Application No. 17/020,002 – MACHINE LEARNING PREDICTION OF THERAPY)
• Processing of up to millions of DNA variations (SNPs) using multiple states of the art polygenic score algorithms
• Seamlessly combining genetic and longitudinal patient clinical data
• Rapid creation of new polygenic scores from GWAS studies
• Handle both genotyping and whole-genome sequencing data
• Unique treatment and pharmacogenetic algorithms
• Secure serverless, multi-tenant cloud platform
• Easy to use web-based GUI to be used by primary care physicians and other non-geneticists health professionals

How it works

The system uses a simple cheek swab to genotype the patient and uses the genetic data created for any future genetic analysis.

After the genetic data is uploaded, clinical information is imported from the EHR and is processed by the cloud-native platform. The output data can be sent back to the physician, EMR, and even the patients.

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