By Allison Proffitt
January 9, 2017 | Last week PatientsLikeMe announced a partnership and investment from iCarbonX that positions PatientsLikeMe as the cornerstone of iCarbonX’s new Digital Life Alliance, which aims to digitize and analyze all aspects of life.
iCarbonX is the brainchild of Jun Wang, former CEO of BGI, who stepped down abruptly in July 2015. Wang told Nature News then that he had his sights set on building a health-monitoring system driven by artificial intelligence that could spot links between genomes, phenotype, and lifestyle.
Wang didn’t share a name for the company then—or a funding plan—but even in July 2015 he planned to build a village.
“The end goal is to develop an ecosystem. It will be a virtual village. When people ‘stay’ in the virtual village, it will advise them on how to live more healthily and for longer, including hints about what they should eat and what exercise they should be taking. It could tell them about warning signs before they get depressed; when they are stressed, it could tell them how to release the stress. All the advice will be based on various factors including genetic make-up and lifestyle. Individuals, doctors, researchers, pharma companies will all be part of it,” Wang told Nature News’ David Cyranoski.
Now Wang’s iCabonX has invested nearly $400 million in seven companies that make up the “village”. Wang announced the members of the iCarbonX Digital Life Alliance last week at the 1st Digital Life Summit & Digital Life Alliance Global Recruitment Conference in Shenzhen, China. In addition to PatientsLikeMe, the Alliance includes SomaLogic, HealthTell, AOBiome, GALT, Imagu, and Robustnique.
A large chunk of the $400 million has gone to PatientsLikeMe.
“The ecosystem we’re creating will connect biology, experience, and AI so that we can learn how diseases manifest in the body over time, and how our everyday actions contribute to their progression,” said Wang in a statement. “PatientsLikeMe will be at the core of this ecosystem as we digitize, analyze, and share insights and knowledge that can improve lives.”
The New Old PatientsLikeMe
The iCarbonX investment opens a funding round for PatientsLikeMe, Martin Coulter, PatientsLikeMe’s CEO told Bio-IT World last week. So far PatientsLikeMe has raised at least $100 million. “iCarbonX or Jun Wang is the majority of that; Invus [LP, PatientLikeMe’s anchor investor for the past decade] is a minority,” Coulter said. “There are sequencing services at cost as a smaller component.”
The investment gives Jun Wang a minority equity position in PatientsLikeMe. Wang now sits on the PatientsLikeMe board of directors with Jamie Heywood, PatientsLikeMe co-founder; Coulter; Philippe Amouyal, Managing Director of Invus LP; and Chun Wu, Co-Founder and COO of iCarbonX.
PatientsLikeMe has always served as a meeting spot for patients to share their experiences with disease, treatments, therapies, and drugs. The platform launched focusing on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). When co-founders Jamie and Ben Heywood’s brother, Stephen, was diagnosed with the disease, the two joined forces with a family friend, Jeff Cole, and built a digital platform to collect and aggregate patient-generated health data, giving patients the real-world context to make more informed decisions and improve their outcomes. Today more than 500,000 people use the platform to track and share information about 2,700 conditions.
It’s proven to be a unique and valuable dataset. PatientsLikeMe has collaborated with more than 40 pharmaceutical companies and numerous government organizations, and published over 100 research studies based on patient-generated health data. (For instance, PatientsLikeMe has done extensive research characterizing the patient voice.)
The vision of iCarbonX is the next logical step.
“What’s interesting here is [the partnership] really builds on what we have been doing for the last ten years in supporting patients,” Coulter explained. “PatientsLikeMe—at the heart—has been measuring and making sense of patients’ own data. What this [partnership] does is it adds additional clinical and biological data planes to the existing datasets, empowering patients with this information—richer information—as these types of datasets become ever more consumer accessible.”
PatientsLikeMe has been running a 200-patient pilot to see how adding a clinical data might work. The company has sent technicians to patients’ homes to collect blood samples and has been biobanking them. Coulter says the company is starting the process of analyzing the banked blood samples for proteomic and inflammatory signals, and recruiting patients beyond the pilot cohort for even deeper testing including sequencing and eventually imaging.
“We are recruiting patients into this program, and we will want to not only continue to collect their experiential data, but we will want to start linking in relative clinical data and biological data,” he said. “They’ll be connected and fitted with devices, but also we’ll be going into people’s homes and collecting samples with the idea of being able to collect these richer datasets.”
Coulter didn’t outline limitations for the rollout, though he acknowledged there would likely be some geographic constraints, and said the company plans to be “purposeful” about which conditions to focus on first.
PatientsLikeMe users will be able to opt into the program and later opt out if they wish, but Coulter says that response to the pilot and the idea has been positive. “Our patient advisory council is really excited about it. We’re imagining that folks will want to opt in, though obviously people at any time can opt out.”
Free Lunch in the Village
Most excitingly? Coulter says PatientsLikeMe won’t charge at all for the sample collection, biobanking, sequencing, ‘omics analysis, or data return and platform. “We’re not asking patients for a payment,” he said. “We’re not asking for any kind of obligation.”
The model sounds similar (with several caveats) to Human Longevity’s Health Nucleus. A service that at last look cost $25,000. How is that possible? Coulter pointed out that the cost of sequencing is dropping dramatically. That’s true, of course, but HLI’s in-house sequencing capacity is extensive. Sequencing costs can’t account for a $25,000 discount.
It seems Coulter is counting on an economy of scale.
“Our costs are going to drop just by virtue of cycles and reps and experience,” he said. “Our hope is that we’re going to be able to scale this to very large numbers of people in a way that is either no cost, or low cost, or potentially is paid for by other parts of the healthcare ecosystem that would be interested in well-profiled, well-described patients who’ve got a very rich digital persona… We imagine that value is going to be immense, not only for consumers but for payers and for pharma and biotech and accountable care organizations.”
Within the next 12-18 months, Coulter said, “we know exactly what needs to be done and where we expect to see results and where the value is going to come from.” But beyond that, how the idea will scale? “There’s a lot that needs to be figured out,” he conceded.
Meet the Village
So how does iCarbonX fit in? Is Wang’s investment funding or driving the initiative?
Coulter says it’s a bit of both. “We were on this path anyway. I think the iCarbonX relationship brings us capital, it brings us sequencing capabilities, and it brings us—obviously in Jun Wang and his team—a group that is very, very deep and highly competent in this area of sequencing.”
BGI will do some of the sequencing, Coulter said, and he expects the Alliance to add partners in the future depending on specific condition needs. But already other members of the iCarbonX Digital Life Alliance will enable much of the sequencing and ‘omics analysis ahead.
- SomaLogic’s proprietary protein-measurement technology powers its Wellness Chip Platform. The Boulder, Colorado-based company will provide proteomics data and applications expertise to the Alliance to accelerate the ecosystem’s development. Also under the agreement, iCarbonX and SomaLogic will establish a joint venture in China to provide the SOMAscan proteomics assay for research and health applications in China.
- HealthTell, based in San Ramon, California, will use its proprietary ImmunoSignature Technology to provide valuable information about how an individual’s immune system reacts to various medical, behavioral, or environmental factors.
- AOBiome, another company co-founded by PatientsLikeMe’s Jamie Heywood, is focused on transforming human health through products that restore ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOBs) which current hygiene practices have stripped from the modern microbiome. Based in Boston and San Francisco, AOBiome announced a $30 million investment from iCarbonX last week.
- GALT, or General Automation Lab Technologies, another San Francisco-based company, provides high throughput instruments and tools for the microbial research and product development communities.
- Imagu, an Israeli image understanding and artificial intelligence company, was acquired by iCarbonX last September. Founded in 2005, Tel Aviv-based Imagu Vision Technologies has developed image understanding technologies that enable object recognition in multiple domains by combining knowledge from different worlds of content to solve complex object detection challenges. The company is working to develop advanced data analysis and machine learning technologies that are specifically aimed at improving global health.
- Robustnique Corp. Ltd. was founded in 2010 as a technology-driven company committed to developing recombinant enzymes and high-end cosmetics. Robustnique is recognized as the State-level Innovative Technology Enterprise in China, and has been honored by China’s State Council as a Distinguished Overseas Research Team. The company owns the Tianjin Key Laboratory of Thermophilic Industrial Enzymes and holds more than 30 patents.
But for all of the helps that the iCarbonX Digital Alliance might offer, Coulter sees the PatientsLikeMe vision remaining much the same.
“iCarbonX is starting out life focusing on using biology of the human in nutrition, in skin care, in exercise—so much more in the consumer elements,” he said. “We, obviously, are working with chronic disease and healthcare. For us… the partnership and the investment are simply accelerators, and provide us with additional capabilities.