Google-backed health IT company Flatiron Health has inked an agreement with Foundation Medicine to bring together their different approaches to support cancer treatment, particularly for clinical trials, according to a company statement. It is part of a wider effort by companies applying big data to figuring out the best cancer treatment options.
Life science companies will use their combined technology platform to improve clinical trial design and make it easier and faster to recruit patients into clinical trials, the statement said. Recruitment is one of the biggest challenges of the drug development process. Improving it would bring drug development costs down.
Foundation Medicine uses its genomic profiling technology to detect molecular changes in a patient’s cancer and match them with relevant targeted therapies for clinical rials. Flatiron Health has been working on a couple of approaches to de-siloing data for cancer treatment — one for providers and another for life science companies.
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OncologyCloud helps cancer centers and physicians aggregate clinical, practice management and billing data. Its application for providers is a Web-based program designed to integrate a cancer center’s disparate data systems and give real-time business and clinical intelligence with benchmarking. The goal is to enable providers to use de-identified data from other cancer centers on the platform. It has also been working on a way to use OncologyCloud to accelerate research by matching patients to available clinical trials and automating data collection.
Dr. Michael Pellini, Foundation Medicine CEO said information analytics and cancer genomics offer powerful opportunities to redefine and reshape the way cancer drugs are developed and delivered. “The jointly developed information products born from this collaboration will provide life science companies with a powerful new tool to access actionable data that informs the development of targeted new cancer therapies,” he said.
Flatiron acquired Altos Solutions earlier this year — a specialized oncology software business with an oncology electronic medical record platform and patient portal.
