Collaborations

As a global authority in personalized medicine research and care, the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine brings together knowledge and innovation from around the world. The center collaborates with academic experts, startups, established industry leaders and research nonprofits to develop precision medicine technology and translate it into world-class patient care.

Research teams combine multi-omic technologies and data to develop precision diagnostics and therapeutics for patients with various types of cancers, rare genetic diseases, unique pharmacogenomic needs and other clinical challenges. Dynamic collaborations accelerate this process, bringing more options, faster, to patients who need them.

Team science is integral to research at Mayo Clinic, and individualized medicine is no exception. The Center for Individualized Medicine's collaborative research extends beyond Mayo's walls in a shared drive to connect hubs of expertise, develop cures for devastating diseases and transform care for patients worldwide.

Arizona State University

The Center for Individualized Medicine and Arizona State University (ASU) are working together on many fronts, including an initiative to jointly fund research projects that lead to commercialization opportunities. The first two $100,000 grants aided in the launch of EndoVantage (now RapidAI).

Other collaborative activities include:

• Funding several research studies with Mayo Clinic and ASU investigators, including a biomarker discovery project focused on protein microarray signatures for the detection of colorectal cancer.
• Funding a mass spectrometer for research into metallomics-related biomarkers.

Gerstner Family Career Development Awards

The Gerstner Family Foundation established the Gerstner Family Career Development Awards in Individualized Medicine. Early career investigators receive important seed money to conduct research to predict, prevent, treat and cure disease using individualized medicine approaches.

Learn more about the Gerstner Family Career Development Awards.

Helix Inc.

Mayo Clinic collaborates with Helix Inc., a population genomics company, to sequence participants' DNA to study the benefits of having patients' sequencing data before they have a specific health concern. This work is carried out through the Tapestry DNA Sequencing Research Study, commonly known as Tapestry. Tapestry aims to sequence the DNA of 100,000 Mayo Clinic patients and add results for about 11 actionable genes to the patients' health records.

This work is part of the Center for Individualized Medicine's strategy to promote the use of genomics in population health. Mayo Clinic is committed to improving health outcomes and accelerating research through population genomics.

Helix's clinical Exome+ sequencing technology reads all 20,000 genes in a person's DNA that code for proteins. It also reads hundreds of thousands of informative regions outside protein-coding areas of the exome.

Tapestry focuses on a subset of this data. Specifically, the study team looks at genes related to hereditary breast, ovarian and colorectal cancers, and familial hypercholesterolemia. The team provides a clinical screening result for 11 genes to each participant's electronic medical record. The remainder of the data is saved to Mayo Clinic's Omics Data Platform in the Mayo Clinic Cloud for future use in clinical care, research and education.

Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare

The Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare was founded in 2010 by Mayo Clinic and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). Its goal is to advance research and clinical treatment options related to individualized medicine. The alliance consists of:

• Innovative educational programs to train the next generation of clinicians and biomedical scientists.
• Integrated research activities and projects focused on information-based medicine, genomics and tools that healthcare professionals can use to make diagnoses at the time and place they see patients — at the point of care.
• Entrepreneurial modes to ensure that alliance participants can fully act on and commercialize their educational and research outcomes.

Specific collaborative activities include:

• Making the best use of bioinformatics algorithms for DNA and RNA sequence analysis.
• Offering an intensive week-long computational medicine certificate class for allied health staff, fellows and physicians.
• UIUC undergraduates participating in the Mayo Clinic Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
• Funding Mayo Clinic and UIUC postdoctoral fellows to spend time at each other's institutions.
• Collaborating on the Center for Computational Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine.

Microbiome collaborations

The Center for Individualized Medicine is accelerating discovery and translation of microbiome diagnostics and therapies for a range of diseases through collaborations with:

• DayTwo (Adanim, Israel).
• Evelo Biosciences (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
• Novome Biotechnologies (San Francisco).
• Pendulum Therapeutics (San Francisco).

OneOme

OneOme is a Minneapolis-based precision medicine company cofounded by Mayo Clinic. It is focused on bringing pharmacogenomics into patient care. OneOme's CAP-CLIA laboratory reports provide pharmacogenomically driven guidance for medicines with high levels of evidence in the medical literature.

Regeneron Genetics Center

Mayo Clinic collaborates with Regeneron Genetics Center, a leading science and technology company. Together, Mayo and Regeneron aim to produce exome sequencing and genotype data for 125,000 DNA samples. The samples are from participants in research studies at Mayo Clinic, including those in the Mayo Clinic Biobank. This collaboration, called Project Generation, will result in one of the most comprehensive genomics databases in the world. It will enable researchers to learn more about how genes affect health and disease.

Translational Genomics Research Institute

Investigators from Mayo Clinic and Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a Phoenix-based nonprofit research organization, have developed extensive individualized medicine-based collaborations spanning a variety of diseases, including:

• Breast cancer.
• Melanoma.
• Multiple myeloma.
• Pancreatic cancer.
• Squamous cell carcinoma.

As part of these collaborations, some Mayo Clinic and TGen researchers have received joint academic appointments at each other's organizations.

University of Minnesota

In 2024, the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics provided $1,474,352 in funding to create the Minnesota Functional Omics Resource, also called MNFORce, a field-leading, multidisciplinary team of investigators from the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic. MNFORce brings together experts in genomics, engineering, bioinformatics, diagnostics, precision and gene-based medicine, and cell and animal modeling. This synergy of world-class institutions works across the spectrum of the basic, translational and clinical research to offer transformative approaches for next-generation diagnoses and treatment of disease. Goals include the creation a new center that impacts patients across Minnesota.