ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Aug. 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 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."

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