Cloud-based data management platform Seqster today announced that the company has secured an undisclosed amount of investment from Japanese giant Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The funds invested in Seqster will be used to accelerate the adoption of Seqster’s interoperability technology for enhancing clinical trials, patient engagement and outcomes. 

The San Diego-based company enables organizations and individuals to aggregate electronic health record data, genomic profiles and personal health information from connected devices. The platform allows users to create their own health data profile. 

THE LARGER TREND

At the start of this year, Seqster released its namesake version 5.0 platform, which has new features such as dynamic FHIR-based clinical data retrieval; secure isolated storage of encrypted PHI data and notes from de-identified clinical data, according to a HealthcareITNews report. 

Takeda Pharmaceuticals is collaborating with MIT's School of Engineering in a program which will fund as many as 10 flagship research projects per year in the areas of machine learning and health, including diagnosis of disease, prediction of treatment response, development of novel biomarkers, process control and improvement, drug discovery, and clinical trial optimization, HealthcareITNews reported last month. 

ON THE RECORD

“We are thrilled to have Takeda Pharmaceuticals as a strategic investor sharing our vision and mission of putting patients at the center of all of their health data and making health data into medicine”, stated Ardy Arianpour, Seqster’s CEO in a statement.

“We have created a unique data-sharing environment that retrieves, parses and harmonizes multi-dimensional data sets thereby accelerating the entire drug development process with high fidelity data hosted within a HIPAA-compliant and HiTrust data schema. Seqster provides clinical trial participants a secure platform to consent and share their data with investigators and study personnel in real-time creating a longitudinal health record that facilitates patient clinical trial onboarding, monitoring and post-trial follow-ups.”  

Bruce Meadows, Head of Investments at Takeda Digital Ventures, said: “Seqster’s technology is a very unique platform that addresses interoperability on not only a nationwide scale but also globally. Interoperability is one of the biggest barriers to applying precision medicine to clinical trials and patient engagement.”