Ovation.io, a leading human omics and clinical data company, has announced a strategic collaboration with PrecisionLife, a precision medicine company focused on transforming the understanding and management of complex chronic diseases. The partnership aims to develop drug-response biomarkers for GLP-1 receptor agonist therapies, paving the way for a potential payor-facing diagnostic test that could inform reimbursement decisions based on a patient’s likelihood to tolerate and respond to GLP-1 drugs across specific indications.
GLP-1 therapies offer significant preventive and therapeutic potential but come with substantial financial and operational challenges for healthcare systems. As Steve Gardner, CEO of PrecisionLife, emphasized, “GLP-1s present both a tremendous preventative health opportunity and a major challenge for health systems and payors.”
The collaboration will integrate Ovation’s longitudinal multiomic data from 25,000 U.S. patients treated with GLP-1s and PrecisionLife’s AI-powered combinatorial analytics platform, which is designed to reveal disease mechanisms and pinpoint patients who are most likely to respond to specific treatments.
This first-of-its-kind initiative will investigate the biological factors driving variation in individual response to GLP-1 therapies and identify biomarkers associated with efficacy, safety, and tolerability. The insights are intended to help payors and providers achieve the most cost-effective outcomes, reduce clinical waste, improve access, and maintain healthcare budget sustainability as GLP-1 demand escalates. The data may also support biopharma companies launching GLP-1 products in new indications that currently lack reimbursement pathways.
GLP-1s are among the world’s fastest-growing therapeutic classes, expected to power a USD 95 billion global obesity market by 2030 (Goldman Sachs Research, 2025). In the U.S., projections suggest 30–70 million prescriptions per year by decade’s end. However, their cost and unpredictable patient response highlight the urgent need for precision-based prescribing.
“This proof-of-concept project will enable a more sustainable approach to the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and demonstrate our abilities to provide solutions in high value disease states where precision medicine and therapy selection address unmet needs,” said Curt Medeiros, Chief Executive Officer of Ovation.io. “By combining Ovation's best-in-class longitudinal omics and clinical data generation capabilities with PrecisionLife's world-leading analytics, we aim to build the real-world evidence needed to guide payors toward smarter reimbursement policies that improve patient outcomes while controlling cost. Importantly, our biobank, which is representative of both sex and ethnicity in the US, is scaling in complex, chronic diseases at unprecedented speed."
Through this collaboration, PrecisionLife and Ovation intend to support the development of a Mechanostic® test—a biomarker-driven tool to help payors and publicly funded healthcare systems determine when GLP-1 therapies offer the greatest clinical and economic value. This mechanism-based approach will enable value-based reimbursement frameworks, aligning costs with real-world patient benefit.
Steve Gardner added: “This is our first collaboration with Ovation, giving us access to world-class multiomic and clinical data to expand our proven capability in identifying drug-response biomarkers beyond clinical trials and into real-world healthcare. GLP-1s present both a tremendous preventative health opportunity across multiple indications and a major challenge for health systems and payors. By understanding why some patients respond well and others do not, we can enable payors to make more informed, sustainable coverage decisions, help pharma bring new products to market, and ultimately deliver better value for patients, providers, and the industry.”
As GLP-1 therapies expand into secondary indications—including cardiovascular, kidney, liver, and neurological diseases—predicting individual drug response will become even more critical. The collaboration aims to optimise resource allocation, support responsible use of GLP-1s across therapeutic areas, and enable both cost sustainability for payors and market growth for biopharma companies in an increasingly competitive landscape.
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