In 1896, the marathon returned to popularity as a competition in the Summer Olympic Games in Athens. The Olympic Games turned out to be inspiring to visiting Boston officials who returned home ready to challenge the locals and establish what would become one of the world’s top marathons.[1] Next Monday, April 15th, 30,000 runners will hit the road in what will be the 123rd Boston Marathon.
Across the Charles River and throughout the U.S. another race is being run, the race to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to the world of healthcare. So what does a long running (pun intended) marathon...
Biomarker-guided precision medicine is increasingly important in drug discovery and development. Pharma products that incorporate biomarkers to support optimized trial design and selection criteria are three times more likely to make it from Phase I to FDA approval than those that do not.[1] Clinical trials that leverage biomarkers for patient stratification to guide their inclusion and exclusion criteria made up about 34% of oncology studies in 2017.[2] Clinical trials costs are also affected by biomarker-driven development. Equally impactful, one study notes that the use of a validated...
Much research and analysis in healthcare is based on testing preconceived hypotheses – looking to answer a narrow set of questions in the form of a hypothesis. Traditional statistical analyses begin with an explicit hypothesis – a specific statement of how variables interact to explain an observation or phenomenon – which is then statistically tested to confirm whether or not the data supports that position.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to carry out this type of healthcare testing from drug discovery to targeted interventions at the point of care. We have seen the...
Tomorrow, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. While a public holiday in just a few countries, it is a day to celebrate the success and power of women from gaining suffrage to working their way into the board room. As such, we wanted to recognize some of the women in healthcare (and take it from us we could have featured hundreds if we had the room) who are leaders in their fields and driving innovation within their respective organizations, and healthcare as a whole.
The Orphan Drug Act of 1983 defined a rare disease as one that affects less than 200,000 people. According to the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, there are now 7,000 such diseases afflicting between 25-30 million people in the U. S. and an estimated 350 million worldwide.
Finding therapies for rare diseases not only helps those affected, but according to studies from the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program, new discoveries made from studying these diseases can also provide insights into more common conditions.
At Alexion, we are interested in understanding the rare...
The drive to value-based care has become a significant issue for biopharma companies as more health plans request value-based contracts. According to McKinsey, over 200 of these innovative contracts have been publicly disclosed since 1994¹. The buzz around the biopharma industry is that these value-based contracts are the wave of the future. Although this trend is likely to continue in the immediate future, the shift to these types of contracts may not survive in the long term. Precision medicine may make them obsolete.
Types of innovative biopharma contracts
The two most prevalent types of...
If you drove around Boston in the summer of 2014, you wouldn’t be surprised to see individuals on their lawns, driveways, or in their back yards dumping buckets of ice water over their heads. The chilly act was part of a challenge that encouraged participants to film their icy shower, post it to social media, and nominate others to do the same. The nominee had 24 hours to comply or donate money to The ALS Association. Most people did both and the videos went viral, spreading across the country and, eventually, the world.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was the brainchild of former Boston College...
Biopharma continues to look for ways to streamline the drug development process. With costs of bringing a drug to market now reaching $2.7 billion and the timeline stretching to nearly a decade, stakeholders across the healthcare continuum are clamoring for a faster, less expensive method.
The drug research and development process is well established and has remained largely unchanged over the past few decades and for good reason – it works. The methodology biopharma has followed has given the world many effective drugs which are both improving the quality of life for patient as well as...
“AI is your rocket ship and data is the fuel."
Michael Dell said this to customers and partners at his annual conference, but the message will be one of the key takeaways for the 16,000 attendees expected at the 2018 BIO International Convention to be held in Boston next week. More than 5,000 companies from 70 different countries will be represented at the gathering that brings together biotechnology and pharma leaders for a week of intensive networking to discover new opportunities and promising partnerships. Discussions cover a wide spectrum of life science and application areas including...
