GE and Mayo Clinic Launch IoT Platform for Cancer Research

Global technology company GE and the Mayo Clinic announced on April 11 that they had joined forces to create a new IoT platform to help research on cancer and other diseases. The platform will be launched as part of a new company, Vitruvian Networks.

The project will focus on cell therapies, the process by which cells are extracted from patients to have their disease fighting components enhanced and then returned to the patient. This has been used in the past by one company, Dendreon Corp. to produce a so-called “cancer vaccine” called Provenge, for use against prostate cancer. Vitruvian will initially focus on cell therapies for blood cancers.

“Autologous therapies in the area of regenerative and personalized medicine have shown great promise in treating life-threatening diseases,” said Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine, in the announcement, “We are excited that Vitruvian Networks will further drive standardization of the industry, increase scalability and bring forward the realization of critical therapeutic potential to address the unmet needs of patients around the world.”

GE stated that Vitruvian Networks’ platform will bring business intelligence and real-time data analytics to researchers and therapeutic companies. They’ll use the clinic’s data on biomarkers, cell therapy and clinical outcomes to produce insights to guide further developments. They’ll also use tools from GE Healthcare and other leading but still unnamed partners. The company added that Vitruvian will be able to repurpose analytics and manufacturing processes from GE’s healthcare, aviation and power branches.

The companies say they hope the new venture leads to faster, safer and more effective treatments for patients fighting blood cancers and other diseases. Vitruvian will be headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area.

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