SAP collaborates with MolecularHealth and GATC to offer personalized cancer treatment

In the spirit of its mission to improve people's lives, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it intends to offer a personalized treatment option service, in collaboration with MolecularHealth and GATC Biotech, to qualified employees fighting cancer.

The service would be based on MolecularHealth's TreatmentMAP™ software and generate an individual tumor analysis for each patient, providing a clinical interpretation of the clinical and genomic patient data to support their physician in making an individualized treatment decision. In Europe, sequencing data is planned to be provided by GATC Biotech; and in the United States, MolecularHealth intends to run its own CLIA-certified sequencing lab. These huge amounts of data would be processed with an ultra-fast genome alignment algorithm, which is part of the SAP® Genomic Analyzer solution and used to assemble the full exome DNA sequence in three minutes — about 300 times faster than the alignment software previously used.

Treatment options based on sequencing data processed by MolecularHealth's TreatmentMAP powered by the SAP HANA® platform are anticipated to be delivered to the oncologists treating SAP employees. It is then up to the oncologist and patient to confer and decide upon an appropriate course of action, but they would be armed with additional information which may not have been otherwise available. MolecularHealth's TreatmentMAP software is the first registered medical device of its kind in Europe for personalized cancer medicine.

SAP is planning to offer this service to employees who have been diagnosed with a solid tumor cancer. It is planned to be piloted for employees in two countries, with employees in additional countries gaining the benefit in the future. SAP hopes to convince other employers to consider offering such a benefit.

Personalized treatment made possible by genetic sequencing and the processing power of technologies such as SAP HANA is a major trend in medicine; this approach has the potential to substantially change the odds in the fight against diseases such as cancer. By taking this first step in the plan to make state-of-the-art genetic sequencing in combination with MolecularHealth's TreatmentMAP available to its employees, SAP hopes to spur wider adoption, drive down costs and make this technology available to as many people as possible.