This month’s list of new technology, partnerships, and other announcements includes items from ObvioHealth, Datavant, HumanFirst, and other industry players.
This month’s list of new technology, partnerships, and other announcements includes items from ObvioHealth, Datavant, HumanFirst, and other industry players.
The NEJM Group has launched NEJM Evidence, a free journal sharing studies intended to help readers develop a better understanding of statistical methods used in clinical research. From the publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine, the publication is aimed at bringing new ideas to clinical practices and sharing how trials are designed, and how evidence is generated.
“Our goal for NEJM Evidence is to make the methods section fun and engaging, inspiring readers to be highly critical consumers and examiners of clinical trials,” said Chana Sacks, executive editor of the new publication. “The new journal enables us to publish outstanding research and contextualize it in a way that will change medicine and practice.”
Venture capital firm and joint venture partner BioGeneration Ventures have joined with Lonza in an extension of their collaboration focused on development and manufacturing of small molecules. This marks an expansion of the current arrangement, in which Lonza provides customized services to Forbion and BGV’s large-molecule biologics portfolio companies.
Under the terms of the agreement, Lonza will provide early development services and scalable manufacturing for small molecules. The offering reportedly covers drug substance development, particle engineering development, oral solid drug product development and regulatory services.
Virtual research organization ObvioHealth has launched Augmented ePRO, a clinical trial service blending artificial intelligence (AI) assisted ePRO tools with a centralized clinical rating platform. The tech is intended to help provide more accurate, standardized study outcomes.
“Both patients and expert clinical raters will benefit from this AI-assisted tech platform throughout the data collection and assessment processes,” said Ivan Jarry, co-founder and CEO of ObvioHealth. “But, with an eye towards the future, the annotation feature is especially useful, allowing clinicians to easily capture nuances in patient ratings that can be used to train AI algorithms and lead to even better clinical rating processes in the future.”
HumanFirst has launched OpenAtlas, a no-cost tier of its Atlas platform that enables users to check out and compare more than 1,200 wearables, sensors, and software-based evaluation tools. The company worked with experts from the Digital Medicine (DiMe) Society, US Food and Drug Administration, and others to help create The Digital Measures Playbook, an open-access framework for decreasing risk when deploying, managing, and monitoring connected products in the home.
“Catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopharmaceutical industry has continued to shift clinical trials to home and hybrid models in order to increase access, speed up studies, and provide more patient-centric information,” said Andrea Coravos, CEO and co-founder of HumanFirst. “As clinical trial study teams look to adopt connected health technologies for decentralized trials, our platform helps them evaluate the overwhelming number of products on the market and design a way to safely, effectively, and equitably deploy them.”
Solutions and equipment supplier High Purity New England has landed a $15m USD contract from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). This contract will be used to help expand and accelerate production of pharmaceutical consumables, including single-use assemblies, single-use pumps, single-use mixing systems, and sterile individually packaged components.
Specifically, the contract reportedly will be used to open the company’s fourth facility near their three other buildings, expanding on what is becoming a campus in northern Rhode Island. This facility will expand manufacturing capacity and supports the previously mentioned single-use products.
Drug development services provider TransPerfect Life Sciences has been named a in the Safety category for the 2021 Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards. The honor was given for AI solutions delivered through the company’s GlobalLink AI portal and DataForce services.
TransPerfect President and CEO Phil Shawe said, "It is humbling to receive this award alongside a group of powerhouse organizations that bring life-saving treatments to those in need. Our team works hard to develop innovative solutions, such as our AI safety offering, to expedite timelines and reduce risk. We're grateful to be recognized by the Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards for these efforts."
Digital health company Verana Health has announced a $150m USD Series E funding round, led by Johnson and Johnson Holdings – JJDC, and Novo Growth. The company plans to use the investment to advance its various solutions and enhance its value proposition to customers participating in its real-world data network.
“The healthcare industry needs new ways of creating high-quality data sets from disorganized information dispersed throughout a myriad of electronic health record systems that often lack interoperability and standardization,” said David Parke, the company’s executive chairman and CEO of its first medical society partner, the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “Verana Health is solving this critical need by delivering and analyzing proprietary, curated data sets (Qdata), from both structured and unstructured data that maintain truth to original clinical context; the company is well-positioned to help healthcare providers advance quality care standards, and life sciences companies accelerate clinical research and bring products to market that benefit both patients and physicians.”
Proscia and Datavant have announced the formation of a partnership aimed at delivering digitized pathology data to life-science companies to help in development of therapeutics and diagnostics. The collaboration melds Datavant’s privacy-preserving technology and health-data ecosystem with Proscia’s Concentriq digital pathology platform.
“Pathology data is one of the most difficult sources of data to transform into usable information,” said Travis May, president and cofounder of Datavant. “Enabling compliant connectivity of digital pathology data to other research data bridges bench science and outcomes research, scaling and accelerating the development of highly tailored precision therapeutics for patients.”
Charles River Laboratories International has announced a partnership with Valo Health, the AI-powered data solutions firm. The agreement reportedly combines Valo’s Opal Computational Platform with Charles River’s drug discovery and development capabilities to offer a new AI-enabled drug discovery and development platform.
“Our collaboration with Valo is another step we’re taking toward accelerating drug discovery and development,” said Birgit Girshick, corporate executive vice president and COO of Charles River. “By leveraging disruptive, AI-powered tools like Opal, we can support our clients in more quickly progressing their discoveries to the clinic.”
Digital therapeutics company Sweetch has been named a winner in the 2022 BIG Innovation Awards healthcare category, presented by the Business Intelligence Group. Its offerings include its Just-in-Time-Adaptive-Intervention (JITAI) technology, which converts millions of data points originating from the user’s smartphone and other connected devices into hyper-personalized recommendations.
“Innovation is driving growth in the global economy,” said Maria Jimenez, Business Intelligence Group COO. “We are thrilled to be honoring Sweetch as they are one of the organizations leading this charge and helping humanity progress.”
