Abzu is a selected partner for project Elegant North, an EU project funded by Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak, which aims to create a new strategy for handling data on rare diseases.
Rare diseases, although individually rare, are collectively common. Insufficient disease understanding directly contributes to a lack of treatment efficacy or simply a lack of available treatments. This costs the Nordic healthcare system billions of kroner a year and leaves those diagnosed with a rare disease — half of which are children1 — helpless.
To address the deficiency of treatments for rare diseases, the selected partners in project Elegant North will create a cross-border, rare disease data-sharing platform to foster cross-sector collaboration between researchers, companies, and healthcare systems. The partners expect this effort to result in innovative technological solutions for improved personalized medicine options for patients diagnosed with a rare disease.
“What a great opportunity for Abzu’s scientists and data scientists to collaborate with an extensive network — from bench to bedside — to better understand what causes rare diseases,” says Marco Salvatore, Head of Target and Biomarker Discovery at Abzu.
Abzu will be responsible for the bioinformatics and precision medicine work package. Abzu’s experts in disease understanding and bioinformatics — combined with their proprietary QLattice® discovery engine — will develop the algorithms used to analyze clinical and genetic data for new diagnostic and therapeutic options for a personalized medicine approach to rare diseases.
In addition to Abzu, the partners participating in project Elegant North are Oslo University Hospital (Oslo Universitetssykehus), the Capital Region of Denmark (Region Hovedstaden), The Technical University of Denmark (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet), Plesner (Plesner Advokatpartnerselskab), and the Scania Regional Council (Region Skåne).
The total budget for project Elegant North is 4.717.261 EUR. The formal project period will run from 1 September 2023 to 31 August 2026.
References.
1 Haendel M, Vasilevsky N, Unni D, et al. How many rare diseases are there? Nat Rev Drug Discov. 2020;19(2):77–78.
About Abzu.
Founded in 2018, Abzu® builds trustworthy AI to tackle complex challenges for the world’s leading companies. Abzu established itself as a global leader in explainable, rational, and safe AI in the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to new discoveries in disease understanding and RNA therapeutics. Today, Abzu’s technology accelerates new insights and understanding in pharma R&D and transforms critical and complex business processes for enterprise operations.
Abzu has offices in Copenhagen and Barcelona, and has raised €13.3M in total funding to date. Abzu has been mentioned in Gartner® research, from Market Guides for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management to CoolVendor™, and is the winner of several awards, including the 2023 “Best HealthTech” Nordics Award at the Nordic Startup Awards. For more information, visit www.abzu.ai.
About project Elegant North.
The project Elegant North (Exploring Leukemia, Education, Genetics And Technologies; New Option for Rare diseases Toward Health) aims to create a new strategy for handling data on rare diseases.
Project Elegant North focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship within selected partners in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in order to strengthen cross-sector collaboration between the healthcare system and private companies with a view to innovative technological solutions for personalized medicine in the field of rare diseases.
Learn more at:
https://interreg-oks.eu/dansk/larosatkende/projektbanken/projekt/elegantnorth.1442.html.
About Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak.
Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak is an EU program tasked with investing 140 million euros from 2021 to 2027 in projects that work to solve societal challenges across borders in southern Scandinavia.
Learn more at https://interreg-oks.eu/.
