New life sciences consortium aims to give Indiana researchers better access to health data

The data science initiative AnalytiXIN has launched a new consortium designed to give Indiana researchers better access to health care data—potentially helping Eli Lilly and Co. and other life sciences companies develop new medicines more quickly.

Initial consortium members include Lilly, Indiana University Health, the IU School of Medicine, Purdue University, the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute and the Indiana Health Information Exchange.

Consortium members are all contributing financially to the effort, but the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership—the entity that launched AnalytiXIN in September 2020—declined to provide details about the size of these contributions.

A key component of the consortium, which was announced this week, is a new online database of genetic data from the Indiana Biobank.

“It takes our resources, our assets, and puts them in a collaborative space, makes them more accessible to researchers,” Indiana Biobank Senior Project Manager Brooke Patz said of the online database.

Patz said the online database took about a year to create and went live a month ago.

For its part, Lilly said having access to the genetic information will help the company determine which types of patients could best be helped by particular treatments.

“The consortium will allow us to better understand the underlying causes of disease and discover new biomarkers that inform an individual’s risk for disease. By studying how biomarkers change in the context of their genetic profile, we may be able to identify patients at risk earlier and develop more targeted treatment options,” said Ruth Gimeno, Ph.D., group vice president of cardiometabolic research at Lilly. “With the AnalytiXIN health data asset, we can also better involve patients in developing new therapies and help interested patients join new investigational drug trials tailored to their medical needs.”

The Indiana Biobank itself is not new. Established in 2010 and housed at the IU School of Medicine, the Indiana Biobank holds thousands of samples of blood, saliva and urine from Indiana patients who have given consent to participate. Those patients’ samples and health information are then available to approved academic and commercial researchers.

But the online database makes the information more accessible, and it also allows researchers to conduct longitudinal studies—studies that involve tracking the same group of patients over time. Previously, Patz said, researchers could access biobank samples and health data for individual projects, but longitudinal research was not possible.

“We’re excited to work with our AnalytiXIN consortium partners to harness the power of data analytics, with the aim of advancing scientific research and improving health outcomes,” Lilly CEO David Ricks said in a prepared statement. “Accurate, comprehensive data will provide our researchers with important new insights that will enhance clinical trial design and enrollment and accelerate the development of innovative new medicines for people here in Indiana and around the world.”

Patz said the structure provided by the consortium also helps researchers from different organizations connect with each other for collaborations. “It creates an environment where research ideas are presented, and then, naturally, interests align, and then those researchers can then collaborate together, utilizing the platform.”

Darshan Shah, the executive vice president of data and AnalytiXIN at the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, said AnalytiXIN is working to recruit additional consortium members. The group is targeting additional pharmaceutical companies. It’s also hoping to attract additional health care systems, who could encourage their patients to add their data to the Indiana Biobank, making the that asset more valuable to researchers.

“When it comes to data, one plus one isn’t two,” Shah said. “It’s more like that binary kind of scale where one plus one equals 10.”