Nightingale Health is set to analyse 40,000 blood samples from the largest biobank in Finland, THL Biobank, to help bring personalised medicine to Finnish healthcare.
It plans to enable preventive Finnish healthcare by fully integrating its technology into healthcare systems and providing tools for patients to follow up on their own health.
Teemu Suna, CEO and founder of Nightingale Health, said: “Nightingale’s mission in solving the global burden of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart diseases, is strongly linked to continuous evidence generation.
“This means working with world-leading institutions and biosample collections to build the future of early chronic disease prevention.
“The scientific possibilities of very large sample collections are truly exciting and our scientific team at Nightingale is looking forward to starting their personalised medicine analyses of THL Bbiobank samples.”
Moving from current medical practices
One factor to consider for personalised medicine is the understanding of how to move away from current medical practices where everyone receives similar treatments and have more personalised treatments tailored to specific patient groups.
Dr Peter Wurtz, scientific director and founder of Nightingale Health, said: “Very large sample collections, with samples from tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals, are required to take concrete steps towards personaliszed medicine.
“Analysing the 40,000 THL Biobank samples with Nightingale’s biomarker testing technology allows us to capture detailed biological differences between patient groups. This translates into improved prediction of heart disease and other chronic diseases in the Finnish population.”
Biobank analysis is now viable
Prohibitive costs and time constraints have, until recently, prevented the analysis of comprehensive metabolic data from large-scale biobank collections. Nightingale’s technology has now made this process viable.
Director of THL Biobank, Sirpa Soini, concluded: “We believe that biobanks are an elemental part of solving global health problems. With the advent of personaliszed medicine, biobanks need to go beyond storing samples in the freezers and building clinical data repositories, by acquiring comprehensive molecular measures that have an impact on medical research and can eventually benefit our healthcare system clinical practice.
“We are excited to work with Nightingale to acquire comprehensive biomarker data to enrich our population cohorts at unprecedented scale.
“Our aim is to build THL Biobank into a treasure-trove for the global medical community, helping researchers and clinicians to find novel ways to build better healthcare for everyone.”
Source: Nightingale Health
