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Precision Medicine Services

REPROCELL’s precision medicine services aim to revolutionize the way medicines are developed and selected for patients.

Why precision medicine is important

There is a clear unmet need for better precision medicine strategies to help streamline and optimize the patient treatment pathway. Patients prescribed standard-of-care treatments do not always respond, resulting in unnecessary side-effects and wasted prescriptions.

As an alternative to this "one size fits all" approach, precision medicine considers the complexity of diseases, their subtypes, and their interaction with an individual’s biology.

Personalized treatment plans can be achieved by combining information and data unique to each individual (e.g., clinical, functional, genomic and transcriptomic data) to target drugs to specific patient cohorts.

The result is better health outcomes for patients and more cost-effective healthcare.

REPROCELL’s precision medicine services

At REPROCELL, we are focussed on the use of human data to improve drug development. We support precision medicine in multiple ways:

Published research in precision medicine

Articles that our scientists have published on precision medicine research.

Research article (offsite)
Combining explainable machine learning, demographic and multi-omic data to inform precision medicine strategies for inflammatory bowel disease

This study (conducted by researchers at REPROCELL, IBM, and the Precision Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre) used a combination of demographic, multi-omic, and drug-response data to develop a machine-learning model that can predict patient response to IBD treatments with high accuracy. The model was able to identify differences in drug response between patients with different demographic characteristics, genetic profiles, and IBD subtypes. It also found that the model could predict the efficacy of a new drug, Doramapimod, in patients with IBD.

PLOS One
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263248

Research article (offsite)
Application of pharmacogenomics and bioinformatics to exemplify the utility of human ex vivo organoculture models in the field of precision medicine

In collaboration with the Precision Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (PMS-IC) REPROCELL investigated inter-patient responses to standard-of-care treatments for COPD using human fresh tissue assays. This allowed each data to be traced back to an individual donor. Clinical history and pharmacological, genomic, and transcriptomic data were collected and used to find associations between patient responses, identifying two genes that may contribute.

precision-medicine-graphs-01

Graphs showing the effects of test articles on TNFα release from LPS stimulated human lung parenchyma biopsies, n = 25 donors diagnosed with COPD. Both graphs display data as a percentage of the corresponding DMSO control group. Left: Bar graph depicting mean + SEM TNFα release. Right: Scatter graph depicting individual patient (dots) and mean (black line) TNFα release. The left graph shows an average reduction in inflammation, but when individual responses are investigated (right) patients respond differently to each treatment group.

PLOS One
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226564

Precision medicine on our blog

This blog article describes a collaboration between REPROCELL, industry, academia, and the NHS that aimed to advance precision medicine strategies. By leveraging cutting-edge pharmacology techniques using human fresh tissues (combined with genomics and clinical data) we discovered a dynamic interplay between genetics and drug response. 
This article outlines the core principles of precision medicine and highlights five pivotal advantages it brings to the field. By tailoring medical interventions to each individual's unique genetic makeup, precision medicine holds the potential to revolutionize research, patient care, and the medical landscape as a whole.
As healthcare data continues to expand exponentially, the challenges of managing and extracting value from this data will become increasingly evident. Harnessing the capabilities of modern machine learning and artificial intelligence, these advances offer a glimpse into a future where patient care is finely tailored to their genetic makeup. This blog article explores the potential of precision medicine, the integration of machine learning, and its transformative impact on healthcare systems.
Human tissue testing, a powerful tool using intact human tissues or cells to predict drug behavior, bridges the gap between in vivo testing and clinical trials, offering insights into patient responses to drugs and revolutionizing precision medicine strategies. This article explains how ex vivo research can be used to in pharmacogenomics to explore genetic variations' impact on drug responses.

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