Tuesday, March, 19, 2024 10:03:19

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has recently announced that it has entered into a five-year partnership with GE Healthcare for enabling more precise and safer cancer immunotherapies. Apparently, various diagnostic tools would be developed for predicting the immunotherapy treatment’s efficacy as well as its adverse effects for a specific patient before administering the therapy.

This would allegedly enable physicians to target immunotherapies toward the right patients as well as to avoid ineffective, potentially damaging and costly courses of treatments.

Further from the reports, VUMC and GE Healthcare would be retrospectively analyzing and correlating the immunotherapy treatment response of thousands of VUMC cancer patients, with their anonymized proteomic, cellular, tumor, genomic, demographic and imaging data.

Reliable sources cite that the firms would further develop AI-powered apps which would draw on this data for helping physicians in identifying the most suitable treatment for every individual patient.

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Dean, and President and CEO of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, was quoted saying that the immunotherapy offers huge promise, but is also associated with greater cost and morbidity due to the current unpredictability of the reactions of treatments in some patients.

Dr. Balser further said that the new partnership would provide the opportunity for leveraging strengths of both the Vanderbilt’s organizations to personalize cancer care further through creating new tools which would allow clinicians in predicting more accurately on how the patients would respond to a specific therapy.

Kieran Murphy, President and CEO of GE Healthcare, mentioned that Vanderbilt and GE Healthcare would combine their imaging, genomic, data science and cellular analysis capabilities for improving the clinical decision making. This partnership is a great example of increase in convergence of the data, technologies and tools used by healthcare providers and therapy innovators.

Purportedly, the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and GE Healthcare would also collaborate on methods for improving cost, efficiency and productivity of stem cell transplant processing operations by industrializing operations, improving throughput, digitizing workflows and automating processes.