New research ‘supergroup’ looks to reduce the number of required clinical trials

29-Jan-2019 - Last updated on 30-Jan-2019 at 13:43 GMT

(Image: Getty/ipopba)

The MI-based CRO MMS Holdings is among the team at the Health Analytics Collective, a research group hoping to reduce the need for new clinical trials by using readily available data – and an MIT-incubated programming language.

According to the companies, the new health research “supergroup” aims to shorten the approval process for pharmaceutical and health care groups using real-world evidence (RWE) and other data sources.

Called the Health Analytics Collective, the group will be led by the Julia Lab within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The team also includes the MI-based contract research organization (CRO) MMS Holdings, as well as the Center for Translational Medicine (CTM) at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, where the team will be based.

“We have come together as a consortium to leverage our individual expertise in this area and are in discussions stages with some and execution stages with others for their proposed projects,” said MMS Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Uma Sharma.

Data sources will include the industry as well as patient databases, including both clinical and practice data, she told us.

“Utilizing data that is already available will alleviate the need for new clinical trials and hence speed up the approval process, also allowing for label enhancement of existing projects,” Sharma added.

Key to processing this data is Julia, an MIT-incubated programming language that is designed to solve computational problems quickly, according to the group.

Alan Edelman, Julia co-founder and professor of applied mathematics at MIT said, “We created this collective to forecast the future in health care and make critical decisions, giving data a longer life of more than just one use.”