As per the agreement, the companies will combine Aetion’s real world evidence (RWE) platform with data from McKesson’s iKnowMedSM oncology electronic health record (EHR) system.
Initially accessible to the researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital leading the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demonstration project, RCT DUPLICATE, the solutions will be available for commercial use, soon, an Aetion spokesperson told us.
“The joint solutions offered by McKesson and Aetion allow users to conduct regulatory-grade studies in major cancers and accelerate time to insight on oncology data,” they added.
According to the company, the biopharma industry invested $50bn to support oncology research in 2018 – and only saw an estimated 3% probability of success for any one product. In a bid to reduce the time and cost of drug development, the industry has increasingly been looking to RWE.
As the spokesperson outlined, the joint solutions to be offered by Aeiton and McKesson will enable researchers “to develop evidence for synthetic control arm and label expansion studies, to fulfill post-marketing safety requirements, and to assess the economic impact of treatments.”
While this is the companies’ first partnership, McKesson Ventures earlier this year participated in Aetion’s Series B funding round.
Additionally, the companies also are part of the Friends of Cancer Research Real-World Evidence pilot project, which recently demonstrated the ability to extract several real-world endpoints from various datasets.
Last month, Aetion also announced that former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb joined its board of directors to help to advance the use of RWE in drug development and commercialization.
