GNS Healthcare, a big data analytics company, has formed a new alliance with non-profit patient and research groups intended to uncover the genetic and biologic causes of the complex autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

Backed by a $5.4 million sponsorship from Janssen Research & Development, Orion Bionetworks will use GNS Healthcare’s Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation platform to analyze patient data pieced together from alliance members including the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis, the Institute for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and PatientsLikeMe. The Marin Community Foundation’s Multiple Sclerosis Project Fund will coordinate the project and Magali Haas, currently chief science and technology officer of the non-profit One Mind for Research, will lead Orion.

“I think data-driven models like this are the future of discoveries in healthcare and the development of new drugs. It’s just too slow otherwise,” says Colin Hill, CEO of GNS. “People accepted that before, because there just wasn’t any other way. Now I think the walls of the industry are going to come crumbling down, replaced by something much more data-driven and hypothesis-free, something that’s desperately needed.”

In an effort to make faster progress, Janssen has been pushing for new approaches to neurological disease. “We are in the middle of a revolution for molecular medicine,” says Husseini Manji, head of Janssen’s neuroscience group. “Advances in the field are constantly yielding new information about the body and its diseases. The need to differentiate from existing therapies and the mandate for innovation are clear.” Manji made her comments as she challenged the healthcare industry to expand its thinking beyond product-focused, “magic bullet” drug development and to discuss the need for an integrated approach to patient care in a commentary published in the February 2013 issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

Initially, Orion’s work will focus on integrating clinical, biomarker, and imaging data with rich real-world data from over 7,000 patients with MS, currently in independent databases, to form a causal computational disease model, according to the Accelerated Cure Project. Millions of computer simulations will be run in an effort to provide new insights into the fundamental mechanisms of MS and find underlying causal relationships in the data. This, in turn, will help optimize treatment plans for patients and hopefully pave the way for more effective treatments.

About 400,000 people in the United States and 2.1 million people worldwide have MS, a disease that affects the brain and spinal cord, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. While a variety of therapies that can slow the disease, it has no known cure.

“MS is a complicated condition for physicians to treat because it has various disease stages and a wide number of treatments,” says Philip De Jager, a physician researcher at the Institute for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Currently we cannot predict an individual patient’s optimal treatment course, and there is no personalization in the selection of treatments,” he said.

Other members of the Orion alliance include MetaCell, and program sponsors and supporting partners One Mind for Research, Morrison & Foerster, Recombinant Data, and Weber Shandwick.