Inspire introduces program to foster research collaboration
Inspire, a company aimed toward providing life-sciences professionals with relevant data and insights, has launched the Inspire Research Accelerator. The program is intended to help accelerate medical progress by giving academic researchers the ability to collaborate with the firm, at no cost.
John Novack, Inspire’s senior director of communications, told Outsourcing-Pharma that the company has a history of working closely with researchers from a range of organizations.
“As we’ve grown as a company, we have more capacity to more actively and fully support researchers from academic or nonprofit organizations,” Novack told us. “While we’ve collaborated with researchers from Stanford, Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering and more, those projects have resulted from prior relationships with subject matter experts from those and other organizations. We want to put more structure around these kinds of opportunities, and to seek out new relationships.”
The Accelerator reportedly is geared toward propelling research in a number of ways:
- Unlocking research gaps using longitudinal instruments, particularly for personalized medicine and rare diseases
- Identifying and engaging with cancer and rare disease patient populations based on specific clinical trials experience and interest
- Rapidly deploying validated patient-reported outcome (PRO) measurement tools
- Furthering exploration of complex disease underpinnings by correlating structured and unstructured data and phenotypes reported by patients with other data types such as genomics/multi-omics and other biological data
Novack added that the Inspire Research Accelerator’s initial roster of partners bring valuable resources to the table.
“They all share a deep understanding of the value that healthcare social networks can bring to clinical research,” he explained. “They are all associated with leading organizations and, as mentioned above, we have experience working with each of them, and we’re proud to have such collaborators.”
The founding research partners are:
- Nigam Shah, assistant director, Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University
- Don Dizon, professor of medicine, Brown University
- Isabelle Boutron, professor of epidemiology, Université de Paris
- Harlan Krumholz, cardiologist and health care researcher, Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital
- Stacy Loeb, professor of urology and population health, New York University Langone Health.
Inspire CEO Brian Loew unveiled the Accelerator during a presentation at the recent World Orphan Drug Congress USA event.
