In the same week that Merck and Amgen revealed expanded alliances with AWS, the bioinformatics startup Culmination Bio revealed that it has received $10 million in funding from the venture arms of those companies, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures. Culmination Bio, a spinoff from Intermountain Health, has developed a vast data lake of de-identified patient records spanning over 40 years.
Dr. Lincoln Nadauld, CEO of the startup, notes that the funding is evidence that the data it has collected can address pharma’s longstanding quest to boost the efficiency of drug discovery and development. Frequently, pharma companies have “access to vast datasets, but those datasets are often not the right kind of data,” Nadauld said. “It’s fragmented, or it’s unstructured, or it’s deficient in some fashion.”
Culmination Bio readies data lake based on four decades of patient health recordsConsequently, Culmination Bio is confident that t…