This month’s list of partnerships, manufacturing facilities, new technologies, and other items includes AstraZeneca, Charles River, Veeva, and other firms.
This month’s list of partnerships, manufacturing facilities, new technologies, and other items includes AstraZeneca, Charles River, Veeva, and other firms.
Patient enrollment solutions firm Trialbee has announced a partnership with decentralized trial tech provider Castor. The collaborators will work on ways accelerate patient enrollment, optimize patient engagement, and reduce site burden for clinical trials globally.
“Over 70% of potential clinical trial participants live more than two hours away from a trial site, increasing the need for greater scale and reach in patient awareness for today’s trial designs,” said Matt Walz, Trialbee CEO. “Through our combined capabilities, clinical trials can deploy an end-to-end solution to simplify the patient journey, including early introductions to clinical trials, enrollment performance analytics, and remote data capture for decentralized clinical trials.”
AstraZeneca has announced its intention to establish an advanced active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility for small molecules near Dublin, Ireland, with a planned investment of $360m USD. The new plant reportedly will allow for late-stage development and early commercial supply, with state-of-the-art process technology and digital innovation.
Pam Cheng, executive vice president of global operations and IT, said, “The future manufacturing of APIs for our medicines includes compounds with highly complex synthesis, requiring next generation technologies and capabilities that can respond quickly and nimbly to rapidly-changing clinical and commercial needs. This significant investment will ensure the AstraZeneca supply network is fit for the future.”
Charles River Laboratories International has announced the expansion of its Charles River Accelerator and Development Lab (CRADL) on Binney Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the addition of a second Cambridge location on Bent Street. The lab is intended to offer flexible, turnkey vivarium rental space supported by the company’s expertise in key biohubs.
David Leroux-Petersen, a corporate vice president for Charles River, said, “For over 70 years, Charles River has supplied the research community with industry-leading products and services. When clients utilize our CRADL spaces, they not only gain access to industry-leading vivarium management, they also have access to Charles River’s complete portfolio to accelerate their next major discovery.”
Elligo Health Research announced its virtual AI-powered trial engagement assistant, Root, was named winner of the 2021 Site tank Award at the Society for Clinical Research Site’s (SCRS) recent 2021 Global Site Solutions Summit. The award, modeled after the US television show Shark Tank, is intended to laud research sites for developing technology solutions that enhance and improve clinical research operations and transform business models.
Elligo’s executive director of digital strategy Raj Sharma said, “Poor communication is one of the top patient complaints in healthcare. To be patient-centric, we must be site-centric; sites invest enormous amounts of resources toward patient engagement but instead can utilize cutting-edge technology to reduce inefficient communication and administrative burden to manage participants at scale across multiple studies.”
Life-sciences data firm ScienceIO has announced it is emerging from stealth mode, with $8m USD in ‘seed’ funding from a range of investors. The company’s AI-powered technology reportedly takes unstructured health data into usable information, while protecting patient privacy.
“The industry’s data problem is too large for people to solve alone; that’s why we built ScienceIO, to help every healthcare professional, from technologists to executives, fully leverage data to build new solutions and improve patient outcomes,” said co-founder Gaurav Kaushik.
Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, has announced an agreement with contract research organization Translational Drug Development (TD2) t to adopt Medidata’s Rave CTMS (Clinical Trial Management System) and eTMF (electronic Trial Master File) solutions.
Stephen Gately, TD2 president and CEO, said, “TD2 has worked with Medidata using their Rave EDC (Electronic Data Capture) system for many years; the addition of Medidata’s CTMS and eTMF platforms will allow for even more standardization across data management and clinical operations, creating efficiency, while reducing integration time and resources…This partnership improves our ability to provide valuable, data-driven insights to our clients, which is critical to the success of clinical trial design and execution.”
Veeva Systems has announced the TMF Bot, an added eTMF feature to its Veeva Vault eTMF feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help streamline TMF management and accelerate trial execution. The TMF Bot reportedly uses existing data to classify documents automatically, quickly, and accurately.
“Complexity across the clinical landscape continues to grow, driving companies to new and innovative solutions that can transform trial execution,” said Jason Methia, vice president for Veeva Vault Clinical Operations strategy. “Using AI in TMF is an impactful and practical way to reduce administrative tasks in clinical trials, driving improved compliance and efficiency; the TMF Bot has auto-classified more than 40,000 documents across six customers since it was released, saving hundreds of hours in processing time.”
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has released a new standard for the use of digital therapeutics. DTx comprises an emerging field of medicine that utilizes software-based interventions in order to provide or enhance care.
“The biggest challenge in the digital therapeutics industry is the wide variety of terms used to define it, from digital devices to digital medicine,” said Kerri Haresign, director of technology and standards at CTA. “A clear standard will eliminate industry confusion, making these technologies more widely available for use and adoption. Greater access will lead to better health outcomes for patients. Establishing a common vocabulary allows our industry to focus on the more complex problems, such as evidence-based performance criteria that allow doctors and clinicians to integrate digital therapeutics in their practices.”
E-health company Andaman7 has announced the global interoperability of its technology, after patients were able to collect health data via smartphones from both US- and EU-based hospitals. According to the company, the achievement marks a significant milestone in interoperability and patient empowerment.
Andaman7 founder Vincent Keunen said, “More engaged patients with better health outcomes can help save time and money and aid in the development of more efficient therapies. We believe this is a world premiere; medical records’ access and interoperability is a significant problem – even hospitals in the same country struggle to correctly exchange data. Achieving international interoperability moves the goalposts significantly.”
Cambridge Quantum has announced the release of the Lambeq toolkit and library for quantum natural language processing (QNLP). Named after late mathematician and linguist Joachim Lambek, the software toolkit is designed to accelerate the development of practical, real-world QNLP applications, such as automated dialogue, text mining, language translation, text-to-speech, language generation and bioinformatics.
Chief scientist with Cambridge Quantum said, “Our team has been involved in foundational work that explores how quantum computers can be used to solve some of the most intractable problems in artificial intelligence… The release of Lambeq is the natural next step after the publication a few months ago that provided details of the world’s first QNLP implementation by CQ on actual quantum computers, and our initial disclosure of the foundational principles in December 2019.”
