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Centene Grants $100M to Washington University for Precision Medicine

The precision medicine partnership will focus on Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, obesity, and diabetes.

Centene grants $100 million to Washington University for precision medicine

Source: Thinkstock

By Jessica Kent

- Centene will fund up to $100 million in precision medicine research at the Washington University School of Medicine in an effort to accelerate treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and obesity.

These common, debilitating diseases affect millions of people worldwide, leading to massive healthcare costs and poor quality of life.

The donation will accelerate research at the School of Medicine’s Personalized Medicine Initiative, which aims to develop customized disease treatment and prevention for patients.

“We share the goal of helping to improve the health of our communities through research, education and customized treatment for people suffering from chronic illnesses,” said Michael F. Neidorff, chairman and CEO for Centene.

“We believe personalized medicine is the path to ensure patients get the targeted healthcare they need to fight disease, and we look forward to partnering with such a renowned medical school to initially focus on four diseases that impact millions of Americans, including many of our health plan members.”

Innovations that arise from the initiative will be commercialized through the ARCH Personalized Medicine Initiative, a collaborative effort between the School of Medicine and Centene. ARCH is designed to accelerate the development and implementation of affordable and accessible health solutions for the public, using the innovations developed from this research.  

The investment will utilize the university’s cutting-edge research and biomedical capabilities, including state-of-the-art technologies and internationally known scientists in the areas of microbiome, immunomodulatory therapies, cancer genomics, neurodegeneration, cellular reprogramming, chemical biology, and others.

The funds will also strengthen resources at more than a dozen centers and institutes at the School of Medicine, such as the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs, and several others.

“We will be bringing together world-class resources and intellectual horsepower from every basic and clinical scientific discipline to urgently accelerate the timeline for developing therapies that are more precisely targeted, with aspirations to do so within the next five to seven years,” said David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean, and the Spencer T. and Ann. W. Olin Distinguished Professor at the School of Medicine.

“I believe the most important advances that will evolve from the personalized medicine paradigm will come from harnessing genome engineering technologies to build better model systems of each human disease, and utilizing deep genomic and clinical characterization to enable more effective and less expensive clinical trials.”

Through this partnership, Centene and researchers at the University of Washington expect to advance precision medicine research and develop targeted, personalized treatments for patients with common conditions.

“The partnership supports our global leadership in understanding sequence variants in biological systems that will pave the way for new therapeutic targets, as well as learning more about our own innate biology,” Perlmutter said.

“Once personalized medicine becomes common practice, healthcare workers may examine each patient’s genome — as well as information regarding his or her environment, lifestyle and social network — to identify a customized, affordable approach to optimizing health and medical care.”