CHU de Nîmes, a regional and university hospital in France, has expanded its collaboration with Sophia Genetics, a software company focused on establishing the practice of data-driven medicine as the standard of care.

The hospital will leverage SOPHiA GENETICS' cloud-native SOPHiA DDM Platform for pharmacogenomics research, a field where an individual’s distinct genetic profile is studied to understand the response to medications and thereby support clinicians in their choice of drugs and dosages to help effectively treat patients. 

A cloud-native SOPHiA DDM platform is capable of analysing data and generating insights from sophisticated multimodal data sets and various diagnostic modalities.

CHU de Nîmes is a member of RNPGx, an international organisation of pharmacogenomics researchers.

Researchers from RNPGx’s member institutions have worked with SOPHiA GENETICS to build a pharmacogenomics panel, which is a targeted, capture-based NGS panel to accelerate the process of testing and pharmacogenomics research. 

CHU de Nîmes is expected to benefit from the analytical capabilities of the SOPHiA DDM Platform and gain insights to help quickly and accurately make variant discovery and reporting.

The hospital also leverages SOPHiA GENETICS’s technology to undertake its research and treatment planning for autism and its study on blood cancers.

Now with the expanded collaboration, CHU de Nîmes will continue to have ownership of its research database, thereby building on the work already undertaken by leveraging SOPHiA GENETICS’s solution and expanding the team’s expertise in a variety of research areas.

SOPHiA GENETICS EMEA managing director Kevin Puylaert said: “As precision medicine continues to become the gold standard of care, it’s essential that hospitals and organisations like CHU de Nîmes have access to technologies to help streamline research and treatment planning, starting with identifying how an individual’s genetic profile influences response to a certain medication.

“With the SOPHiA DDM Platform, CHU de Nîmes will be able to advance its pharmacogenomics work, with the aim to bring about a broader use of personalised treatment plans for the French patient population.”