Ovation.io and PrecisionLife have announced that they have reached agreement to commercialise the outputs of PrecisionLife's analysis of Ovation's high-quality GLP-1 receptor agonist dataset.

The companies confirmed that they have identified novel quantitative markers for strong glycemic control (HbA1c) that are specific and different to those for weight loss (BMI) in a real-world population. PrecisionLife will reproduce, refine, and validate these findings in additional datasets provided by Ovation.io, including studies to confirm predictive performance for leading GLP-1 therapies such as semaglutide and tirzepatide against real-world patient outcomes across independent cohorts over the next six months.

The partners intend to bring a consumer DNA test to market to enable individuals to understand their likely personal safety, efficacy, and tolerability profile for GLP-1 drugs to make informed decisions about their risks and potentially achievable benefits. Payors are also evaluating the opportunity to use the companies' insights to inform reimbursement decisions and expand coverage in certain health plans based on an individual's likely level and longevity of response.

In addition to known mechanisms of weight loss and glycemic control, the collaboration has also found new biological mechanisms associated with response. These mechanisms are consistent with those previously identified across several of the 60 complex chronic diseases studied by PrecisionLife, including pathways linked to addiction and neuroplasticity.

This work creates a significant opportunity to improve patient outcomes while reducing unnecessary treatment costs by identifying which patients are most likely to respond to GLP-1 therapies. By enabling a more precise match between patients and treatment, the approach supports more effective use of these medicines at scale.

Building on this, the partners have agreed to co-develop Laboratory-Developed Tests (LDTs) to enable enrichment of clinical trials with strong responders in new indication areas with high unmet need. This also creates opportunities for GLP-1 asset holders to differentiate their products in the post-marketing setting and to improve the probability of success in indication expansion studies. The companies are in discussions with asset holders and sponsors to deploy these stratification tools to enhance clinical trial success and optimise treatment selection.

"The combination of Ovation's high-quality multi-omic and longitudinal clinical data and PrecisionLife's analytics platform has enabled us to rapidly expand understanding of the complex and heterogeneous patient responses to GLP-1 medication. Our teams have generated the world's most detailed insights into why patients respond differently to these medicines. We will make these insights clinically actionable via non-invasive DNA tests supported by our results reporting platform and CLIA lab partners," said Steve Gardner, Chief Executive Officer, PrecisionLife.

As this dataset becomes one of the world's largest precision biomarker discovery resources, the companies will independently validate the current results and expand the scope of studies. Additional clinical annotations will be included in future analysis to identify markers of safety and tolerability, as well as efficacy and safety signals for individual molecules. To date, the markers of strong responses to GLP-1 drugs were also associated with type-II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, lipid metabolism and other disease states. The biomarkers of efficacy were identified in 100 percent of the patients studied.

"We've worked with several AI companies to unlock value from our complex datasets. PrecisionLife lives up to its claims—finding more insights, at pace. We're confident that together we can translate those insights into commercial outcomes and products in GLP-1s and other diseases with huge clinical impact. This collaboration also expands our partnering offer to biopharma and shows the investment case for Ovation's high-quality datasets, they are catalytic to value creation in genomics and precision medicine," said Curt Medeiros, Chief Executive Officer, Ovation.