'Cashing In' On Biobank Networking: BC Platforms Aims To Globalize Its Finnish Model
Executive Summary
Privately-held BC Platforms is one of the networked groups leading the way in clinical genomics data management. Its CEO tells Scrip how the company's foundational start in Finland 21 years ago allowed it to create a critical mass from which it is now expanding globally in the quest to better understand the pathogenic mechanism of diseases.
Genomic data is revolutionizing medicine and health care provision. And at the center of this big data-driven transformation lie biobanks, combining clinical, genomic and biomarker inputs to provide rich sources of health-related data for both academic and industry research.
Successful biobank-driven research will help better allocate health care resources and provide individualized care to patients. Helping to facilitate the evolution of that ecosystem is BC Platforms, a privately held group whose high performing genomic data management technology enables flexible data integration, secure analysis and interpretation of molecular and clinical information for some 70 institutions in 22 countries.
BC Platforms got to an advanced, innovative stage by working initially within Finland's modern, tech-savvy health care system, where it gained critical mass and from there expanded – first to other Nordic countries, then to Europe, and now it is operating in the US and Asia.
Mining In Finland
BC Platforms' CEO Tero Silvola told Scrip, “Finland has a unified health care system, where public sector service providers work in co-operation with private health care service providers. This model is one of the most effective systems globally.” Regional and local patient registers are integrated into a national data lake, so that information can follow a patient from one service to another. Finland has five university hospitals, all of which have targets to build data driven Biobanks as part of their infrastructure development.
The work in Finland between the biobanks is well co-ordinated and private companies like BC Platforms are welcome members in this new ecosystem. "Finland has quite exceptional conditions for a genetic research covering the whole population," Silvola says.
BC Platforms' CEO Tero Silvola
Finland, with a population of approximately 5.7 million people, has an internationally unique Biobank Act that makes collections compiled by hospitals and research institutes available for all researchers. Combined with the other strengths of Finland – comprehensive registers, electronic medical records and a research-friendly population – it enables extraordinary opportunities for new research and business.
"Moreover, thanks to the genetically unique Finns, genomics data is faster to analyze and the probability of findings is higher than in genetically heterogenic populations," Silvola says. Mining these Finnish “assets” has allowed BC Platforms to conceptualize the right technology to manage the data access and build core databases around which further data can progressively coalesce and become integrated.
In October 2018, BC Platforms announced it was launching its genomics platform for HUS, the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, which is the largest health care service provider in the whole Nordic region. BC Platforms will be providing its customizable, end-to-end, software-as-a-service platform to provide actionable reports to enable HUS to offer the best therapeutic options for their patients, based on their genomic profile. The ability to match therapeutic recommendations based on a patient’s genomic profile will result in HUS being the first hospital in Northern Europe to deploy these capabilities on a wide scale, Silvola notes.
The arrangement reflects the fact major Nordic hospitals are at the forefront of deploying solutions to personalize their patients’ health care, methods made possible by the growing ability to process raw genomic data from biobanks in one platform to deliver actionable patient reports.
A biobank’s usual goal is to promote the health of citizens by providing biological samples for use in medical research. The biobank’s sample collections can help determine the relationship that exists between genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors when it comes to various diseases, and they can help gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of disease.
"In Finland, it’s easier and faster to find those interesting variants that are needed to target that indication process in pharma. So, you need less in, fewer numbers and bases, to really find something interesting, which will then boost your target identification process," Silvola says. With that data core ecosystem in place, BC Platforms' believes it has what it needs for serious expansion into other countries.
"The thinking is that we could basically use the Finnish data as a core and then we could replicate the results with other genotypes in other geographies. It could become one of the core advantages that we have," Silvola says.
Then 'Going Global'
Going global lies at the heart of BC Platforms' business strategy, providing genomic data and analyses that hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and academia will require in future. "It is extremely important to have a broader coverage, because none of the populations, countries, nor none of the biobanks is big enough,” Silvola says, adding that whatever pharma is involved, it is equally important for them to complete the studies and make sure that they actually do cover all geographies with all haplotypes. “And having a presence on all three continents, it’s even more important for us than only focusing on Scandinavian countries."
Three Partnership Categories
The majority of BC Platforms’ revenues currently come from the US, where it is looking to emulate what the Nordics are doing, to match their patient treatment options to their genomic profiles. To achieve that, BC Platforms has built many collaborations and partnerships. Its CEO says partnerships essentially fall into three categories.
"One important category of partners are the Cloud vendors. They are strategic partners for us, because today we are accumulating significant data volumes and we do need significant amount of computing capacity."
BC Platforms therefore works closely with vendors like Google or Microsoft to optimize infrastructure workflows and technical features that work well with algorithms and even artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms.
Another segment of “go to market” partners are the instrument vendors and other providers of proprietary data such as Illumina Inc., which can rapidly analyze millions of genetic data samples at reduced cost using their sequencing devices.
We work with these providers to integrate data into our systems. This proprietary data together with the publicly available data from Biobanks helps to broaden our access globally across therapy areas and genetic populations in order to advance precision medicine related capabilities for our pharmaceutical and life science partners, including Pfizer Inc. and Amgen Inc.
The third category would be so called content-related partners. "Partners that are helping us to really provide actionable reports, so insight from a certain therapy area to the clinical decision making,” Silvola says. "I would categorize the partners in those three segments because our platform is very open and modular, it is very easy to build the ecosystem around our approach," Silvola said.
This article is part of the Outlook 2019 series – an annual collection provided exclusively to subscribers of Informa Pharma Intelligence publications.