Camden to house a storehouse of genetic data
The Camden waterfront will soon house a new for-profit offshoot of the Coriell Institute for Medical Research that is developing a system to store and interpret patients' complete genomes, the genetic material containing hereditary information.
The Camden waterfront will soon house a new for-profit offshoot of the Coriell Institute for Medical Research that is developing a system to store and interpret patients' complete genomes, the genetic material containing hereditary information.
Coriell Life Sciences Inc. will follow its parent's tradition of doing high-end scientific work in Camden, thanks in part to a $1 million loan from the Camden Economic Recovery Board, set up more than a decade ago to revitalize the city.
Coriell's $3.3 million venture will use whole-genome sequencing to improve health care. Once the company moves out of the Coriell Institute on Haddon Avenue this summer, it is expected to employ 26 new full-time people at a state-owned waterfront building. A lease is being negotiated with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which owns the building and oversees the recovery board.
Coriell Life Sciences will develop three products - GeneVault, Gene Exchange and Gene Dose - that will store genomic data, interpret that information, and operate a network that can deliver the data to physicians, said Scott Megill, the company's president and chief executive.
The aim is to let doctors order DNA tests as easily as they do other diagnostic tests.
"It will allow a doctor to see what best drugs are for a patient," Megill said.
He added that human genome sequencing allows doctors to screen a baby still in the womb with just a drop of blood from the mother - much less intrusive than amniocentesis.
Hospitals in the area and other scientific companies are already interpreting genome data but usually for a particular disease, Megill said. "No one is tying all the interpretation in one place," Megill said.
Coriell hopes to create a pipeline so hospitals throughout the country can bring their data to Coriell's network and get expert evaluations, Megill said.
"What we are doing is building an additional sales and marketing channel that can bring new patients" to those hospitals, he said.
Coriell joined with International Business Machines Corp. for the new business, and Megill said the technology infrastructure was being built "on top of IBM's secured data architecture" to ensure that each patient's medical information is fully protected.
"We are taking a layered approach to security and privacy management by using encryption, de-identification, and data-salting techniques," he said.
Coriell's $1 million loan from the Camden board was approved by the state Economic Development Authority last month. The loan is part of a leftover pot of money given to Camden during the state takeover, which ended in 2010.
