Community

Blood Donations Provide Lifesaving Treatments and Potential Research Opportunities

by Luna

An ongoing partnership answers the call of blood donors by providing new clinical research opportunities. After the success of community-focused studies to develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, blood donors asked what more they could do as research participants to improve the health of their community.

Through an ongoing collaboration between San Diego Blood Bank and LunaPBC, blood donors are able to support health research along with providing a lifesaving donation.

“When we began collecting convalescent plasma for COVID-19 hospital patients at the height of the pandemic, donors who recovered from the virus came out in droves to donate to help those in their community and beyond,” said Nikhil Nayak, Chief Business Officer for San Diego Blood Bank. “Our blood donors often ask about additional ways they can support our mission, so we are proud to afford them the opportunity to influence the future of personalized medicine through innovative programs like this.”

San Diego Blood Bank is a platform for ensuring the community’s health by connecting its resources and diverse blood donors with research opportunities. Luna was the optimal partner because of its people-centered framework that increases participant engagement and retention, ensures interventions meet the priorities and needs of individuals, and facilitates comprehensive, longitudinal studies.

Read San Diego Blood Bank and LunaPBC Provide Blood Donors an Opportunity to Contribute to Health Research.

“Factors such as genetics, age, gender, and ethnic origin play an important role in the effectiveness of medical treatments, which is why diversity in research participants is incredibly important,” said Nayak.

Dedicated blood donor Jeff Gonka said, “One standard blood donation could save up to three lives, but one small blood sample donated for research could potentially save thousands of lives.”

Do you live in or visit the San Diego area often? Join the San Diego Research Community on Luna today.

About Luna

Luna’s suite of tools and services connects communities with researchers to accelerate health discoveries. With participation from more than 180 countries and communities advancing causes including disease-specific, public health, environmental, and emerging interests, Luna empowers these collectives to gather a wide range of data—health records, lived experience, disease history, genomics, and more—for research.

Luna gives academia and industry everything they need from engagement with study participants to data analysis across multiple modalities using a common data model. The platform is compliant with clinical regulatory requirements and international consumer data privacy laws.

By providing privacy-protected individuals a way to continually engage, Luna transforms the traditional patient-disconnected database into a dynamic, longitudinal discovery environment where researchers, industry, and community leaders can leverage a range of tools to surface insights and trends, study disease natural history and biomarkers, and enroll in clinical studies and trials.

Wrapped presents on a color background
Discovery

Survey Finds 67% of Americans Would Rather Give a Gift To Benefit The Greater Good

by Luna

A new survey from LunaDNA found that two in three Americans (67%) would rather give a gift to benefit the greater good than receive a material gift for the holidays. Of the majority of Americans who prefer altruistic gift-giving, older adults (65+) are more likely than younger adults to give a gift to benefit the greater good.

LunaDNA’s parent public benefit corporation, LunaPBC, commissioned The Harris Poll to conduct an online survey among over 2,000 adults to better understand sentiment toward people’s relationship towards giving. The results are weighted to be representative of the American adult population across various demographics, including age, gender, and ethnicity.

During the most ‘giving’ time of year, it’s reassuring to know that people are more interested in giving back to benefit others, and not just material gifts. These findings reinforce LunaDNA’s commitment to provide people with a year round opportunity to share their health data and reshape health discovery to improve well-being for all.”

Deb Thompson, VP of Strategy + Operations
Harris Poll Holiday Survey Infographic
Harris Poll Holiday Survey Infographic

The survey findings come days after LunaDNA’s one-year anniversary since receiving approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to recognize health data as currency. Last year, LunaDNA made history becoming the world’s first platform to offer ownership shares to individuals in return for  genomic, personal, and health data. This initiative promotes people from study subjects to research partners by including all research participants in the value created from health discovery.

Since then, the LunaDNA platform has been breaking down data silos by crowdsourcing real-world and “missing data” in a manner unlike current models and aggregating that data in a controlled analytics environment to support research. This person-centric model is highly beneficial to pharma, academics, governments, and medical institutions aiming to accelerate medical breakthroughs.

Benefiting the greater good is LunaDNA’s core mission, not only to drive discovery, but to do so while honoring the individual health data contributor. The people-powered health data sharing platform improves participant engagement, efficiency, and velocity of research, and brings people together to share health data to benefit communities worldwide.

The key findings from LunaDNA’s survey enforces that the majority of Americans are more altruistic when it comes to gifting. Subsequently, LunaDNA is partnering with the San Diego Blood Bank to build the world’s largest local research community to support research, enable individuals to become active, valued participants in research, and ultimately enable people to gift a give that would truly benefit the greater good.

I believe the future of discovery and people’s data will be sideways not siloed, connected not dictated, socially responsible, and transparent.”

Dawn Barry, President + Co-Founder at LunaPBC

Learn more about this exciting new partnership

LEARN MORE

About Luna

Luna’s suite of tools and services connects communities with researchers to accelerate health discoveries. With participation from more than 180 countries and communities advancing causes including disease-specific, public health, environmental, and emerging interests, Luna empowers these collectives to gather a wide range of data—health records, lived experience, disease history, genomics, and more—for research.

Luna gives academia and industry everything they need from engagement with study participants to data analysis across multiple modalities using a common data model. The platform is compliant with clinical regulatory requirements and international consumer data privacy laws.

By providing privacy-protected individuals a way to continually engage, Luna transforms the traditional patient-disconnected database into a dynamic, longitudinal discovery environment where researchers, industry, and community leaders can leverage a range of tools to surface insights and trends, study disease natural history and biomarkers, and enroll in clinical studies and trials.