BioPharma, Health Tech

Science 37 teams up with medication adherence company to bolster virtual clinical trials

Science 37, a telehealth company that facilitates virtual clinical trials, struck a partnership with data analytics company AiCure to better track how patients are responding to treatment.

With the Covid-19 pandemic putting most clinical trials on hold, pharmaceutical companies are looking for creative solutions to keep studies running. One of the problems they face: How do you track if a treatment is working from afar?

Science 37, a company that facilitates virtual clinical trials using telehealth tools, teamed up with medication adherence company AiCure to help solve this problem.

The two companies are teaming up to offer a host of telemedicine tools for virtual clinical trials. To start, they will support a 150-person virtual trial of a treatment for major depressive disorder. Science 37 will recruit and enroll patients, with tools to fill out consent forms electronically and connect patients to investigators and nurses over telemedicine. Investigators will track patients’ progress using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), where patients are asked a series of questions about their thoughts, ability to sleep, appetite and other metrics.

“Combining our comprehensive, integrated platform with AiCure’s unique AI technology will enable sponsors to develop even more meaningful data for their research,” Science37 CEO David Coman said in a news release.

AiCure can track if patients are taking their medication using facial recognition. CEO Edward Ikeguchi said patients get a reminder on their phone to take it. They hold up the pill bottle to their phone, and the software can recognize it’s the correct medication.

The company has also begun to use its facial recognition software to collect information on certain biomarkers, such as facial and vocal expressiveness.  Ikeguchi said the company had initially done this work as a standalone test through a cell phone. Now, AiCure is able to measure these indications through video conferences conducted via its app, as more appointments go online.

“Sponsors have begun to ask us, what other information can you tell us about that patient during that interaction?” he said in a phone interview.

For example, with Parkinson’s disease, blinking can be a useful measurement if medication is working. Patients with Parkinson’s disease will often blink fewer times per minute than average.

“If you’re a doctor trying to interview a patient, would be difficult to measure how many times they blink per minute. But a computer can record that and measure that exquisitely accurately,” Ikeguchi said. “You can take those measurements in the context of medication adherence.”

As the pandemic continues, Ikeguchi said virtual clinical trials have become a focus for pharmaceutical companies. Since in-person appointments have slowed to a trickle, many of them have seen their trials impacted by Covid-19.

“The conversation is either, ‘we have a project that’s out there. What can we do from a telemedicine or virtual trial standpoint to salvage that trial? Or, we’re planning a study in one quarter or two quarters away, and we don’t know what the situation’s going to be with Covid. What can you do to help us as a backstop?’” Ikeguchi said. “It has impacted their whole business because it’s such a global event.”

Photo credit:  photo_chaz, Getty Images

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