PRECEDE Consortium Announces Konica Minolta Precision Medicine as its Precision Health Partner to Advance its Mission to Increase Survival Rates for Patients with Pancreatic Cancer

August 17, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ambry Genetics
1 Enterprise
Aliso Viejo, CA 92656

The partnership brings an integrated diagnostic approach to advance the early detection of pancreatic cancer.

Aliso Viejo, CA – August 17, 2021 – The PRECEDE Consortium (PRECEDE) and Konica Minolta Precision Medicine, Inc. (KMPM) announced today that KMPM and its subsidiaries, Ambry Genetics and Invicro, have joined as partners to bring a novel integrated diagnostic approach to support PRECEDE’s mission for increasing survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients through early detection.

According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, with a 5-year survival rate of just 10 percent^[1]. The PRECEDE Consortium is a highly collaborative international effort comprised of over 35 leading academic medical centers across the globe to transform the early detection and prevention of pancreatic cancer, with the aim of increasing the 5-year survival rate from 10 percent to 50 percent within the next 10 years.

Together, KMPM and PRECEDE Consortium will bring their expertise and resources in genetic testing, pathology, and imaging to determine who is at an elevated risk for developing pancreatic cancer, define that risk, and invite those at elevated risk into state-of-the art clinical screening programs. The coordinated plan by KMPM and the PRECEDE Consortium is to analyze and standardize data curated through LATTICE™, an integrated diagnostics platform, that runs on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). LATTICE uses Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service that helps organizations store, transform, query, and analyze health data, and will help researchers and clinicians gain new genomic insights for detecting and preventing pancreatic cancer.

One of the most significant challenges in determining who is at an elevated risk for pancreatic cancer has been the lack of infrastructure and protocols to support the translation of molecular imaging data, sequencing data, and diagnostics technology data. The analysis of this data is critical for informing disease detection, prevention, and treatment. KMPM’s focus on multi-omics and multimodal data has spurred their development of LATTICE, which they plan to use to securely aggregate diagnostics, imaging, and informatics data from the PRECEDE study in one seamless, standardized platform to better derive new insights for preventive and managed care.

“As a surgeon and scientist who has spent my entire career taking care of pancreatic cancer patients and trying to improve survival for this intractable disease, it is clear that early detection is likely to have the greatest impact in changing outcomes,” said Dr. Diane M. Simeone, Principal Investigator of PRECEDE and Director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. “Through this innovative partnership we expect to curate and analyze large amounts of data in an unprecedented way to optimize early detection methods for pancreatic cancer.”

“Machine learning may offer healthcare and life sciences organizations the opportunity to normalize, index, structure, and aggregate data in a way that makes it easier for clinicians to understand relationships in data and support better patient care,” said Dr. Taha Kass Hout, Director of Machine Learning at AWS. “We are excited to support the PRECEDE Consortium as they work to predict and prevent pancreatic cancer using LATTICE.”

“Early identification can have a life-changing impact for patients at a high risk for pancreatic cancer,” said Aaron Elliott, KMPM CEO. “By leveraging the LATTICE platform, PRECEDE will be able to help more healthcare providers, researchers, and scientists harness the power of diagnostics, imaging, and informatics to find novel associations and biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic cancer.”

The PRECEDE Consortium is currently providing clinical care to high-risk patients at designated academic medical institutions and enrolling eligible patients into its observational longitudinal prospective cohort study. The PRECEDE study plans to grow to include over a hundred institutional partnerships and expand the cohort to over 10,000 high risk individuals for this important study. For more information on PRECEDE and its Consortium members please visit, precedestudy.org

^[1] American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures 2021. Atlanta, Ga: American Cancer Society; 2021.

About PRECEDE

Founded in 2018, The PRECEDE Consortium is a highly collaborative international effort to improve survival for pancreatic cancer by improving early detection, screening, risk modeling, and prevention for those with a heritable risk for pancreatic cancer. PRECEDE’s mission is to increase the survival of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer from 10% to 50% in the next ten years by partnering with top researchers, industry, academic institutions, survivors, and families dedicated to preventing and ending pancreatic cancer. The largest effort of its kind, PRECEDE utilizes a novel collaboration and data-sharing model to evaluate at-risk individuals for pancreatic cancer. Working collaboratively, PRECEDE aims to better define who is at risk, determine the level of risk, and enroll those at elevated risk into state-of-the-art screening programs to help put an end to pancreatic cancer.