Culmination Bio, a data and technology company combining clinical and biospecimen data, entered a R&D collaboration with Merck in the area of autoimmune disease. 
  
Merck will have access to both clinical (Electronic Health Records, labs, medications) and paired biospecimen (tissue and blood) data from several cohorts of various sizes and qualifications. The project-based collaboration leverages Culmination’s ability to build both retrospective and prospective deidentified multi-modal datasets in a disease-defined fashion.
 
As a spinoff from Intermountain Health, Culmination Bio maintains exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and paired biospecimen data. Its repository of over five million de-identified patient samples is continuously growing by over 300,000 samples a year, which helps companies with rapid research queries. Its partnership with Intermountain Health helps to expedite the recruitment of prospective patients for clinical trials using its patient network across hundreds of facilities. 
 
“Our collaboration with Merck represents a significant milestone in our mission to accelerate healthcare research,” said Lincoln Nadauld, MD, Ph.D., president and CEO of Culmination Bio, “This agreement exemplifies the need for rapid access to high-quality longitudinal patient data spanning decades to inform clinical research.”

In November 2023, Culmination Bio announced an investment from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (Merck GHIF) and Amgen Ventures, which was used to further develop its database and expand its commercial growth with pharmaceutical partners.