Regeneron, Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine Ink Gen

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine (CCPM) said Monday that they would sequence 450,000 exomes and match the results with phenotypic data from deidentified patient health records to advance drug discovery, genomic medicine, and precision medicine. 

Through this new collaboration, the pharma company's Regeneron Genetics Center will sequence and annotate the samples from the CCPM biobank at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. CCPM physicians will validate genetic findings from these sequences in UCHealth's CLIA laboratory so they may return clinically actionable results to patients, the entities said. 

"This partnership opens up new doors for meaningful discovery, strengthens Regeneron's ability to speed and improve the drug development process, and allows us to work alongside other leaders in the advancement of genomic and precision medicine," Aris Baras, Regeneron senior vice president and head of the Regeneron Genetics Center, said in a statement. 

"This collaboration will take an already notable program at the CCPM and expand the depth and breadth of its capabilities, allowing us to give more back to our patient participants than ever before," CCPM Director Kathleen Barnes said. Barnes cited the center's considerable work in pharmacogenomics to date. 

"Our collaboration with the RGC will lead to an optimization of patient care, using personalized results to better inform clinical decision making, and potentially leading to new ways of diagnosing, preventing, and treating illnesses," she added.