This month’s list of announcements about technology, funding, and more includes Medable, Clarify Health, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and other key companies.
This month’s list of announcements about technology, funding, and more includes Medable, Clarify Health, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and other key companies.
Patient-centric solutions company Medable has launched the Medable Partner Network, bringing together a group of technology, service, data, site, and direct-to-patient companies that can work together to accelerate decentralized trials. It includes new partnerships with Advanced Clinical, Cognizant, and CVS, and expanded relationships with Datavant, Oracle, Parexel, PPD, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Syneos Health.
“The next stage of clinical trial transformation is collaboration at scale. Accelerating innovation requires an ecosystem, so we’ve created the Medable Partner Network to simplify collaboration for both sponsors and partners,” said MaryAnne Rizk, chief strategy officer at Medable. “Our ecosystem of certified partners allows us to innovate faster together, so we can deliver smarter trials to meet the needs of patients and address the biggest challenges in healthcare.”
Charles River Laboratories has expanded its strategic partnership with SAMDI Tech. Established in 2018, the partnership gives SAMDI clients access to Charles River’s lead-like compounds for high-throughput screening; under the expanded agreement, Charles River is the exclusive partner for promotion of SAMDI technology.
“Our collaboration with SAMDI Tech is another step that we’re taking toward accelerating drug discovery and development,” said Wilbert Frieling, corporate senior vice president of global discovery services with Charles River. “By generating quality data faster during hit identification, we can help our clients make critical go/no go decisions earlier in the process, to advance their programs.”
Life-sciences analytics company Clarify Health has introduced Clarify Trials, cloud software designed accelerates clinical trial recruitment within underrepresented communities. The technology offers more than 400 social determinants of health (SDoH) insights in order to help identify research sites and investigators with the best opportunity to enroll diverse patients and assess physician referral patterns to support coordinated outreach within underserved populations.
“The ongoing pandemic has cast a light on long-standing, unfortunate truths about disparities within healthcare, including a lack of diversity and inclusion in clinical trials,” said Kenneth Park, senior vice president and general manager of life sciences with Clarify Health. “Clarify Trials addresses an unmet need in the market by looking at trial recruitment with a diversity lens. It goes beyond assessing the historical performance of research sites and investigators by precisely determining their ability to recruit underrepresented patients.”
Unlearn.AI has announced a multi-year collaboration agreement with Merck KGaA, focused on using tech to accelerate late-stage trials. Planned solutions include the use of Digital Twins, which are comprehensive, longitudinal predictions of a patient’s prognosis on a control treatment.
“We are very pleased to establish this collaboration with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and to be working with its world-class team who shares our vision for how AI and other innovative technologies can expand access to new medicines,” said Charles Fisher, founder and CEO of Unlearn. “Our solution has successfully proven that it can reduce the size of control arms by 30% or more and generate reliable clinical evidence in a fraction of the time.”
ATCC, a biological materials management and standards organization, has landed three grants totalling more than $5.5m from the Defense Treat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work reportedly will center on identifying and characterizing novel therapeutic approaches to viruses with potential global health concern.
"ATCC is committed to supporting this global health initiative by providing the novel scientific research and development solutions needed to address these high-morbidity and mortality infectious disease outcomes," said Raymond Cypess, chairman and CEO of ATCC. “Through our new partnership with DTRA, we now have the opportunity to focus on the development of novel machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models for countermeasure identification that may lead to better vaccine and therapeutic solutions, which are needed to save lives."
Analytics company Excelra and artificial intelligence specialist X-Chem are joining forces to accelerate preclinical drug discovery and help researchers find new drug candidates for hard-to-drug targets. The collaboration will center on Excelra’s GOSTAR and X-Chem’s RosalindAI technologies.
X-Chem senior vice president Noor Shaker said, “AI is revolutionizing drug discovery in ways never thought possible before, and RosalindAI is leading the way with AI tools that are accurate, scalable, and robust, enabling a transformation in preclinical drug discovery. Our collaboration with Excelra will enable us to leverage GOSTAR data and enable AI in ways never possible before.”
Thermo Fisher Scientific is joining forces with Medidata Acorn AI, a Dassault Systèmes company, on site selection and patient enrollment solutions. The PPD clinical research business of Thermo Fisher has worked with Medidata to develop PPD TrueCast, which combines patient recruitment and site performance data with predictive models and advanced analytics.
“The clinical trial industry continues to demand new tools in big data and predictive analytics to improve trial planning and execution and accelerate clinical trials,” said David Johnston, senior vice president and president of clinical research with Thermo Fisher Scientific. “As a result of the vast site-level data amassed by PPD and Medidata, customers now have even greater visibility into how a trial is performing for any study our clinical research business is helping them run.”
Healthcare data specialist H1 has acquired Faculty Opinions. A longtime partner of H1, Faculty Opinions brings together comments and opinions from thousands of medical scientists to highlight and validate clinical research.
Ariel Katz, CEO and co-founder of H1, said, “We could not be more excited to welcome Faculty Opinions and their amazing team to the H1 family. Acquiring Faculty Opinions is an important evolution that allows us to continue growth as a go-to source for healthcare professionals, while also providing unique access to the latest discourse within the scientific community.”
Building upon its ConvergeHEALTH offering, designed to help life-science and healthcare companies connect data to share information and insights, Deloitte has announced ConvergePROSPERITY and ConvergeCONSUMER to help clients in other areas. The move comes as part of the company’s $750m USD investment in software platforms, ecosystem and alliance relationships, in addition to hiring of diverse software engineering, data scientist and industry professionals.
"As industries continue to transform and converge at an increasing pace, our clients — should and do — expect more from their consultants," said Dan Helfrich, CEO of Deloitte Consulting. "This investment represents our ongoing commitment to their success. It also supports our goal of attracting and retaining the world's best talent across industries and areas of expertise like data science, engineering and design."
