WATCH – Customer success story | Corewell Health
Background
Alzheimer’s disease is the seventh leading cause of death in the world, and it is estimated that by 2030, 78 million people will be living with it or another form of dementia. The research community is devoted to finding treatments for Alzheimer’s, but scientists are struggling to identify viable candidates for clinical trials. Sponsors are grappling with an almost existential question around which patients are eligible for trials – factors like age, disease stage, disease subtype and even gender are proving to have massive impacts on results. Enrolling the wrong patients could be a costly mistake.
The Michigan-based Corewell Health Research Institute is working on finding prognostic or diagnostic biomarkers for those who are most at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. These could be used for more effective recruitment of clinical trial patients, improving study outcomes and getting breakthrough treatments to market more quickly.
VUGENE’s solution
Many of the studies taking place within Corewell Health’s neuroscience research produce vast quantities of multi-omics data that must be sifted through to identify what is predictive of a disorder and what is just noise. To prevent their researchers from getting bogged down in this analysis and allow them to focus on the science, the hospital group partnered with VUGENE.
For several years, VUGENE has been building solutions that ingest omics data from studies and translate it into insights that support grants and publications. In August 2025, a collaborative analysis with Corewell Health helped uncover novel epigenetic signatures linked to vascular dysfunction in dementia, leading to a paper that was published in Molecular Neurobiology.
“We started seeing a picture of how you can have a transcriptomic layer translating things into metabolomics when the person is healthy, but when you have a disease, this relationship disappears,” said Dr. Juozas Gordevičius, VUGENE’s founder and Chief Technology Officer. “This gave us an entirely new mechanistic insight into how cells work.”
According to Dr. Stewart Graham, Corewell’s Founding Director of Translational Neuroscience, VUGENE allows his team to make discoveries faster. “There’s the speed, but there’s also the accuracy and the thoroughness of it,” he said. “Previously, it would have taken us six months to a year, whereas now I get a turnaround in a month.”
Cover photo credits: sripfoto / Adobe Stock
