Sanguine BioSciences, a Valencia-based biotechnology company enabling personalized medicine research, announced Thursday that it has signed commercial agreements with, and received orders from, more than 200 biomedical researchers at academic, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, to enable more efficient personalized medicine research. Ongoing agreements are in place with a wide range of organizations, ranging from startups, such as Inhibrx, to contract research organizations, such as Applied Immunology, and major drug developers, such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Sanguine directly engages patients diagnosed with severe and chronic diseases to collect and de-identify biospecimen, medical history and other data that can be used in biomarker research. Traditional methods are to obtain biospecimen through hospitals, but this process can result in months of delays as the focus for physicians and staff is on diagnosis and treatment, not facilitating research efforts. By engaging patients directly, Sanguine can meet the needs of researchers and offer timely turnaround of biospecimen and medical data with diverse ranges for age, race, disease state, gender and treatments underway. The patient engagement tactics used by the company have led to a 95 percent retention rate, which also allow for follow-up draws for longitudinal studies.

“In a very short amount of time, and with only recently hiring our first few sales executives, our company has established agreements with ten of the largest drug developers in the world and continues to see high demand for our offering,” said Brian Neman, founder and chief executive officer of Sanguine. “Researchers have specific needs to complete studies in early discovery work, sometimes run with blood samples drawn the same day and other times requiring follow-up draws on exact time schedules, but traditional strategies to obtain these add months to the timeline. Our commitment to patient engagement, transparency and advocacy removes much of this wait time – accelerating the research and increasing the efficiency of the process overall.”

Sanguine is able to meet, review disclosures and collect blood samples in a patient’s home with its own phlebotomists in multiple major U.S. cities. Patients are also able to track how their de-identified biospecimen and data are used through the donor web portal. The company is able to collect and process blood from patients with any disease and has already built large libraries in multiple chronic and severe conditions, including Huntington’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and others.

In order to maintain appropriate confidentiality, all samples are de-identified immediately upon collection. Sanguine maintains and reviews internal ethical guidelines for the procedures under high scrutiny from an independent review board.

About Sanguine

Sanguine BioSciences is a biotechnology company bridging the gap between patients and researchers developing personalized medicine. The company engages patients in biomedical research by delivering transparency throughout the research process. Sanguine collects and de-identifies patient-derived data in the form of biospecimen, and physician and self-reported information. These data are generated and then made available to researchers involved in drug and biomarker research and discovery with leading academic laboratories and companies, such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals.