Welcome to the real world

BOSTON & SAN FRANCISCO—A key goal of pharma research and development is, of course, to get to clinical studies, but in preparation for that last leg of the “R” part of R&D, many feel that much could stand to be improved. To that end, PAREXEL International Corp., which considers itself an innovator of global biopharmaceutical services, and Datavant Inc., a healthcare technology company focused on enabling the secure de-identification and linking of healthcare datasets, have announced they are partnering to enhance clinical study design and operations, as well as the generation of real-world evidence.

 

As part of PAREXEL’s focus on providing innovative scientific and clinical data strategies, the collaboration will enable the linking of healthcare data from a variety of real-world and clinical study data sources to improve drug development and commercialization processes.

 

“As clinical study complexity increases, data-driven protocol design, optimized study operations and the application of real-world data are critical to successful and safe drug development and commercialization,” said Jason Martin, corporate vice president of Global Data Operations at PAREXEL.” The exponential growth of healthcare data offers both an opportunity to incorporate this wealth of data into the clinical study processes and commercial evidence generation, and a challenge, given the disparate sources where a patient’s healthcare data may be contained. Partnering with Datavant will allow PAREXEL to optimize clinical studies and real-world evidence generation using techniques that represent a true inflection point in how information will be consolidated in our industry.”

 

Datavant’s technology enables the linking of traditional healthcare data sources including electronic medical records, claims and diagnostics with additional emerging sources, such as genomics, socioeconomic data, data from wearable devices, behavioral data and more. The two companies also aim to advance hybrid study delivery to help life-sciences companies more effectively generate evidence and demonstrate product value.

 

“Data silos cause significant hurdles to utilizing healthcare data to improve patient care. Datavant’s technology offerings—coupled with PAREXEL’s wealth of expertise and years of experience in clinical study operations, real-world evidence generation and working with multiple real-world data sources—provide an opportunity to answer some of the most difficult questions in drug development and commercialization for the ultimate benefit of patients,” said Travis May, co-founder and CEO of Datavant.