Last month, Genentech launched an unusual five-year research pact. The San Francisco subsidiary of the drug giant Roche partnered with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based PatientsLikeMe to mine the online patient network's database of real-world experiences. In exchange for an undisclosed fee, Genentech now has access to nearly all of the information collected by PatientsLikeMe, which currently includes more than 250,000 members with 2,000 different conditions. The hope is that studying the network will help Genentech learn how to stratify patient populations more precisely and measure drug effectiveness better, among other things.At the helm of PatientsLikeMe is Jamie Heywood, a mechanical engineer by training who devised the idea for the platform ten years ago when he noticed some striking similarities between the information asked of online dating websites and clinical trial portals. With his brother Benjamin and friend Jeff Cole, Heywood founded PatientsLikeMe later that same year. Nicholette Zeliadt spoke to Heywood about where the crowdsourcing site stands a decade on from its inception and what this new partnership with Genentech will mean for open-participation research.
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