Health technology leader Royal Philips and sequencing and array-based technology company Illumina have announced a collaboration that will integrate Illumina’s sequencing systems with Philips’ clinical informatics platform. The two companies will coordinate sales and marketing efforts for the combined offering, while also recruiting health systems in the U.S. to participate in clinical research collaborations focused on precision medicine programs in oncology.
Philips and Illumina will collaborate to provide new solutions aimed at the acquisition, analysis, annotation, and interpretation of genomics data in oncology cases. Leveraging Illumina’s BaseSpace sequence hub and fed through Philips’ IntelliSpace genomics informatics platform for oncology. This integrated offering will combine data from multiple sources—radiology, immunohistochemistry, digital pathology, medical records, and lab tests—and will deliver a consolidated dashboard view.
“The value of genomic information for personalized care, and for the treatment of patients with cancer in particular, is tremendous,” said Jeroen Tas, CEO of Connected Care and Health Informatics at Philips. “Until now, the ability to use genomic data with the aim of having a precise diagnosis of cancer and improve treatment was mostly for the domain of academic centers. Through this collaboration we will unlock the value of genomics for a much wider group of laboratories and care providers to help them advance genomics initiatives at greater speed, with the aim to offer precision medicine with better outcomes for their patients.”
With this collaboration, Illumina and Philips will focus on system integration, cohort analysis, and health economics applications. The integrated system will allow laboratories to correlate sequencing data with information from multiple data sources, including imaging, pathology, and laboratory systems, while also providing clinicians with advanced analytics, deep learning technologies, data from the scientific literature, and treatment and evidence guidelines—all in a single view.
“We believe that this collaboration will provide an excellent path for our next-generation sequencing systems to be incorporated into health systems in the U.S. and worldwide,” said Francis deSouza, president and CEO of Illumina. “One key strategy in our commitment to improving human health is connecting genomics to the everyday business of healthcare: based on integrated patient data, embedded into clinical pathways, supported by real-world evidence and reimbursement models.”
Based on those goals, the partnership between the two companies has strong synergies, as Philips aggressively moves to capture customers in the healthcare sector. Late last year, Philips launched its IntelliSpace Universal Data Manager, a system that is designed to integrated disparate data sources within a healthcare environment and deliver them to clinicians with a health system. It also deepened its precision cancer care collaboration with New York Medical College, a co-creator of the Intellispace Genomics platform, and deployed that platform in collaboration with molecular decision support company N-of-One as the lynchpin of Westchester Medical Center Health Network’s new precision medicine initiative.
