Boehringer Ingelheim partners with Precision Health Research, Singapore

Boehringer Ingelheim joins forces with Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) in a new partnership with the joint aim of transforming healthcare and improving patient outcomes in Singapore and beyond.

This partnership will energise Singapore’s precision medicine research, innovation and industry collaboration in data science. It will also strengthen Boehringer Ingelheim’s data science, enabling the company to connect genetic data with symptoms and lifestyle data in its key research and development (R&D) focus areas. By addressing the diversity gap for Asian genomes, it will also advance both partners’ joint ambition to build a database including all ethnicities, enabling the development of treatments for all people worldwide.

There is an urgent need to address many emerging and longstanding diseases for which patients have no or only limited treatment options. Data science offers the opportunity to identify new therapeutic concepts to address these healthcare challenges, understand patient needs better and accelerate research and development of new breakthrough therapies to transform patients’ lives.

Jan Nygaard Jensen, Global Head of Computational Biology and Digital Sciences at Boehringer Ingelheim said, “With this partnership with PRECISE, we are pioneering deep translational insights for Asian patients within our focus disease areas, further bolstering our data science ecosystem. Building a leading, ethnically balanced data science platform will enable us to accelerate our research and create deeper insights to inform drug discovery and development.”

Professor Patrick Tan, Executive Director of PRECISE, said, “We are glad to welcome Boehringer Ingelheim as the first pharmaceutical partner for PRECISE which establishes a foundation for a consortium of pharmaceutical collaborators. Through this consortium, scientists from both sides will be able to enhance and work with the PRECISE-SG100K population cohort study to better understand the primary risk factors for chronic conditions of high importance to Asian populations. This partnership will lead to insights that better predict and prevent chronic diseases, which complements PRECISE’s long-term strategy in enhancing preventive health and improving patient outcomes through data-driven health solutions.” Professor Tan is also Senior Vice Dean (Research) at Duke-NUS Medical School and Chief Scientific Officer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, Agency for Science, Technology and Research.

The PRECISE-SG100K study is a landmark comprehensive prospective population health study of 100,000 Singaporeans to identify the social, environmental, lifestyle, and genetic factors associated with diseases prevalent in Asian populations, such as diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.

Consortium partners will develop algorithms and tools to utilise advanced data science techniques to analyse anonymised datasets from the study – in compliance with the Singapore Government’s anonymisation standards for data access and governance – to generate new insights into mechanisms underpinning health and disease in Asia.

The PRECISE-SG100K study is coordinated by Professor John Chambers at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Chambers is also the Chief Scientific Officer of PRECISE.

Boehringer Ingelheim is committed to translational research and has a digital strategy spanning the whole R&D value chain. To enable unprecedented medical insights, the company is collaborating with leading programs from around the world such as Genomics England, FinnGen, Our Future Health UK and the UK Biobank.