Artificial Intelligence, BioPharma

Roche, PicnicHealth start RWD partnership with multiple sclerosis focus

The companies will use a combination of more than seven years of medical record data with five years of prospective data on 5,000 MS patients, including real-world outcomes data and MRI images. Other disease areas to be explored include hematology and rare diseases.

Swiss drugmaker Roche and its U.S. subsidiary are working with a startup focused on real-world data to use patient data to advance research in multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

San Francisco-based PicnicHealth said Thursday that it had partnered with Roche and its subsidiary, South San Francisco, California-based Genentech, to find insights buried in data from MS patients that can be used to help develop treatments. The multi-year project in MS will involve taking more than seven years’ worth of medical record data and combining them with five years of prospective data for 5,000 patients. The data include MRI images of MS patients combined with real-world clinical outcomes.

“Our strategic partnership with PicnicHealth will allow us to better understand serious diseases and accelerate development of effective treatments tailored to the individual needs of those patients,” Roche head of pharma partnering James Sabry said in a statement. “By combining PicnicHealth’s unique built and curated real-world data sets with groundbreaking science, we are aiming to make personalized healthcare a reality across multiple therapeutic areas.”

Following the initial focus on MS, the companies have expanded into other disease areas in neurology, hematology and rare diseases as well. These include Huntington’s disease, hemophilia and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria.

PicnicHealth’s technology relies on what it calls “human-in-the-loop” machine learning, which involves both computer algorithms as well as curation of data by people. The company says that enables it to use records from any medical facility in the U.S., regardless of format, health system or electronic medical record system.

The Roche-PicnicHealth collaboration is one of several such collaborations that drugmakers have made with companies providing RWD services in recent years. For example, New York-based Aetion has partnered with a wide variety of drugmakers on real-world evidence, as well as with groups like drug-pricing watchdog the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review and, more recently, with the Food and Drug Administration to analyze data on Covid-19.

Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images

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