A patient-centric tool to provide a virtual research network for rare diseases to improve clinical trial recruitment has taken the top prize in an innovation challenge from Sanofi US.
Registries for All Diseases will get $300,000 to create a comprehensive, crowdsourced, cross-disease registry to help accelerate translational research for more than 1,000 diseases. It will also work with mentors at Sanofi to advance its tool. It was one of four finalists in the Collaborate Activate Innovation Challenge seeking to disrupt clinical trial research and healthcare.
One requirement of the competition was collaboration between non profit organizations. Among the groups on Registries for All Diseases are Genetic Alliance, CFIDS Association of America, National Psoriasis Foundation, and the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The competition began earlier this year at the Partners in Patient Health Forum in Washington, DC. The challenge required two or more groups to collaborate in order to qualify for the contest and designed to promote sharing of complementary resources among partnering organizations. It’s part of the Bridgewater, New Jersey-based drug developer’s initiative Partners in Patient Health, in which the company has partnered with the advocacy community by connecting people, ideas, and solutions to advance patient health.
It is one several ways companies are trying to make the clinical trials more efficient by making greater use of big data, remote monitoring and finding different ways to collaborate. Groups are also increasingly trying to create ways to make these approaches more patient centric to generate better patient outcomes.
