VANCOUVER, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PHEMI, the company delivering privacy, security, governance and enterprise-grade management for big data, today announced that the Personalized Medicine Initiative (PMI), based in the Life Sciences Institute of the University of BC, has deployed PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse to collect, store and manage genomic and clinical data for the Molecular You Corporation (MYCo) Pathfinder Project.

“We’re proud to be part of the Molecular You project and we look forward to helping PMI and other life science leaders leverage Hortonworks Data Platform and PHEMI Central to realize the tremendous potential of precision medicine.”

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Molecular You is a groundbreaking program that will provide 20,000 participants a molecular level understanding of themselves over the next 5 years, and provide scientists with new information necessary for detecting disease risk and initiating early intervention. PHEMI’s data management solution, tightly integrated with Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP™), brings the scale, performance and rigorous privacy, security and data governance required for precision medicine applications like Molecular You, and allows volumes and varieties of data to be collected and managed – from gene sequences to clinical care notes to personal activity tracking.

“This is an exciting time for medicine. With new technologies that quickly and affordably sequence a person’s genome, and big data technologies that enable us to make the most of our data, we are in the position to significantly improve individual patient outcomes, save millions in healthcare costs, and open the doors for new discovery, prevention and treatment methods,” said Rob Fraser, COO at PMI and co-founder of MYCo. “PHEMI is a valuable partner helping us achieve our goals. They provide a secure big data solution that lets us easily collect and share data with the various research organizations contributing to this project and, at the same time, protect the privacy of our program participants.”

With an overarching mission to introduce technologies for personalized medicine into the frontlines of healthcare, the PMI realized that big data could give them the ability to rapidly adapt to the pace of innovation, and looked to PHEMI Central. MYCo, as a spinoff of the PMI, will sequence and analyze each participant’s genome for disease risk factors. In addition, it will collect proteome, metabolome, microbiome (and other Omic data), physical activity and other health indicators on a regular basis. PHEMI Central leverages Hortonworks® technology, which provides an open platform that deeply integrates with existing IT investments and unlocks the broadest opportunities from Hadoop, by indexing and cataloging features to deliver a system that scales economically, allowing MYCo to more effectively collect and analyze data over time.

PHEMI Central applies a Zero Trust Data approach, giving MYCo control over who can access what data for what purpose. Consent, data sharing agreements and privacy policies can all be enforced automatically within the system. Sensitive data can be dynamically de-identified before sharing. PHEMI Central allows MYCo to automatically provide differing views to their various users and applications – from researchers only allowed access to de-identified data, to experts consulting on specific tests, to clinicians who need to view personal health information to provide participant consultations – all while protecting privacy and enforcing data sharing agreements.

“It’s rewarding to see how PHEMI Central is helping advance precision and personalized medicine,” said Dr. Paul Terry, president and CEO of PHEMI. “PHEMI Central is ideally suited for MYCo. It provides a flexible and scalable means to store, curate, and manage structured and un-structured data – and our Zero Trust Data approach supports multi-stakeholder access with security, privacy and governance in place. This opens the door to the broader healthcare ecosystem – including partner organizations conducting research on cancer, pharmacogenomics, and brain health studies – so that they can utilize MYCo’s data to conduct research and find solutions that improve diagnosis, treatments and overall general wellness.”

PHEMI Central is built on top of Hortonworks HDP and helps to streamline big data collection, management, analysis, and application development. PHEMI Central combines full-life cycle data management and fine-grained access control with Hortonworks enterprise grade big data platform making it an ideal, production-ready big data solution for healthcare and other data-driven markets. “PHEMI fills an important gap in the marketplace by bringing privacy to regulated industries like healthcare and life sciences, where protecting private and sensitive data is paramount,” said Richard Proctor, General Manager, Global Healthcare, Hortonworks. “We’re proud to be part of the Molecular You project and we look forward to helping PMI and other life science leaders leverage Hortonworks Data Platform and PHEMI Central to realize the tremendous potential of precision medicine.”

Read more about PHEMI’s vision and strategy for big data in its whitepaper Zero Trust Data: Solving the Data Dilemma.

In a separate announcement today, PHEMI also revealed details of its Zero Trust Data approach.

Learn more about how Zero Trust Data is applied in the personalized medicine arena in the PMI video.

About PHEMI

PHEMI delivers privacy, security, governance and enterprise-grade management for big data. Its flagship product, PHEMI Central, applies the Zero Trust Data approach, which embeds and enforces consent, data sharing agreements and privacy policies at the data level, removing a critical roadblock standing in the way of enterprises that aim to become data-driven.

PHEMI Central lets organizations easily access and mine any variety of data at any volume to drive insights that lower costs, improve outcomes, and allow better decisions faster. An Organizational Ambassador for Privacy by Design (PbD), PHEMI brings both privacy and performance to big data, along with the data management and control to ensure innovation, and privacy, security and governance. For more information visit https://www.phemi.com/ and follow us on Twitter.

About PMI/MYCO

The PMI is an inclusive organization representing stakeholders in BC and Canada that has the objective of bringing personalized, molecularly-based medicine to Canadians with the aim of improving healthcare outcomes and efficiency as well as enabling more effective preventive health delivery. The PMI is based at the Life Sciences Institute at UBC; Canada’s leading Life Sciences Institute. http://personalizedmedicineinitiative.ca

Molecular You Corporation (MYCo) is a spinoff company (incorporated November 20, 2014) of the UBC-based Personalized Medicine Initiative. (MYCo) is creating a health guidance system based on the participant’s molecular makeup, clinical evidence and body of scientific knowledge. This “user’s manual“ will contain molecular level information (e.g., genetic information, blood proteins and metabolites, gut microbes) combined with vital sign information collected from wearable technology (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, activity levels) and environmental conditions. This data will be integrated and analyzed using computational biology approaches cross-referenced with the latest scientific and clinical findings to objectively characterize health status and to identify potential transitions from health to disease using various molecular (i.e., Omic) metrics.

Contacts

PHEMI
Media Contact:
Interprose Public Relations
Melissa Power, 401-454-1314
melissa.power@interprosepr.com