The San Francisco-based healthcare technology company has named Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) as its Founding Academic Partner, marking integration of its 150th dataset, which includes clinical trial data, claims data, pharmacy data, electronic health records, and genomics, among others.
The combination of DCRI’s analytic expertise and proprietary datasets, with Datavant's reach and data integration capabilities, sets the foundation for a partnership “that will transform the process of drug development,” said Datavant President and Co-Founder Travis May.
DCRI will work with Datavant to implement clinical trial design that leverages combined datasets and analytics, according to the company – as it aims to reach its goal of doubling the success rate of drugs entering clinical trials by 2020.
When asked how he proposes to meet this objective, May told us Datavant is able to offer a broader set of insights to clinical trialists and “ensure that good assets don't fall through the cracks” through integrating clinical trial data with real-world datasets.
“While many investigational drugs fail due to inherent shortcomings in safety and efficacy, for many promising medicines it's instead a failure of matching the right dose to the right set of patients and designing a trial that demonstrates separation of signal from noise,” he said.
Datavant has initiated a number of pilot programs with pharmaceutical partners through which it will “generate invaluable learnings to further augment the insights our product delivers,” said May.
In the upcoming months, he said the company is focused on executing these pilot efforts, expanding its data partner network, and bringing additional talent to its team.
“The problem that we aim to solve will require the collective action of a network of healthcare stakeholders,” said May, “and we are always eager to partner with like-minded players in the space to bring much-needed transformation to the industry.”