Culmination Bio secures USD 10M in investment from MGHIF

Culmination Bio announced a $10 million investment from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (Merck GHI) and Amgen Ventures. As a spinoff from Intermountain Health, Culmination Bio maintains exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and biospecimen data. As the most extensive data lake of its kind, it enables biopharmaceutical companies to gain important insights critical to facilitating diagnostic and therapeutic development. This funding will allow Culmination Bio to further develop its exclusive Intelligence Platform and expand its commercial growth.

Today, there is no efficient process to bring a drug or diagnostic to market. It can take over a decade and billions of dollars to obtain regulatory approval for treatments or diagnostic tools. The problem starts with getting access to longitudinal biological and clinical patient data, which can take life sciences and biotech companies months to collect and process.

With a continuously growing library of over five million de-identified patient samples and clinical data spanning decades, biotech and life sciences companies partner with Culmination Bio for rapid access to retrospective patient data and faster access to thousands of prospective patients for studies.

“With support from our investors, Culmination Bio is raising the bar for healthcare innovation,” said Lincoln Nadauld, MD, Ph.D., president and CEO of Culmination Bio. “On top of our existing longitudinal patient data, we are adding over 300,000 biospecimens to our data lake each year. Because of this, we have the ability to quickly identify unique patient cohorts from our vast data lake that can speed up critical research, leading to novel discoveries..”

In addition to speeding up patient recruitment, the platform offers quick query capabilities across genomic, biological, clinical, and claims data, which has already supported research on everything from population-wide genetic studies to drug discovery.

“Culmination’s Intelligence Platform provides collaborators with access to uniquely rich de-identified clinical datasets,” said David M. Rubin, Ph.D., Managing Director at Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. “GHIF looks forward to working with the talented and experienced Culmination management team to harness the power of precision medicine to improve outcomes for patients.”

“Unlocking the power of patient data, with important initiatives like Culmination Bio’s Intelligence Platform, will help to accelerate the journey from bench to bedside,” said David Reese, EVP R&D Amgen. “Culmination Bio is helping to drive a transformative era in biopharmaceutical innovation, and together, we are rewriting the narrative of drug development, ushering in a future where breakthroughs happen at the speed of data.”
MB Bureau