Strand Genomics, a Bangalore-based bioinformatics company and Clinigene International Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of Biocon India Ltd. announced a strategic partnership where Strand will analyse the clinical data generated by Clinigene in various registries to discover patterns that can give insights into diseases. The goal of the partnership is to discover new biological wisdom from the clinical data, which would lead to novel diagnostics and therapies.

Dr Srinivasan Seshadri, CEO of Strand Genomics, said, "The partnership with Biocon exploits the synergies that exist between the two companies. Clinigene is well equipped to generate clinical data and we are uniquely positioned to analyze the data using the high-end data analysis expertise within Strand in conjunction with our proprietary data mining tool 'Soochika'. Strand has developed proprietary algorithms for finding interesting patterns in clinical data and has already used the algorithms to unearth significant parameters."

"Clinigene has developed unique registries based on well characterized patient population in diabetes and lipidemia which contains valuable clinical data at three levels- biochemical, proteomic and genomic. These data bases provide a powerful and proprietary basis for exploring new disease leads," explained Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, CMD of Biocon.

Dr. Vijay Chandru, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Strand Genomics informed, "We expect the combination to create valuable intellectual property."

"The Clinigene-Strand partnership is the first of its kind in the country to pursue biomarker discovery in specific disease segments through clinical research on a bioinformatics platform. We are confident that we will announce early breakthroughs," added Dr. A.S. Arvind, COO, Clinigene.