Pfizer joined the TriNetX global health research network, which will allow it to access clinical data from the network’s healthcare organizations.
Pfizer joined the TriNetX global health research network, which will allow it to access clinical data from the network’s healthcare organizations.
TriNetX, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, connects healthcare organizations, biopharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations (CROs) in order to collaborate and share data. This has the goal of improving clinical trial design, making it easier and faster to recruit patients to trials, and accelerate the clinical trial process.
TriNetX indicates that its cloud-based platform lets researchers “analyze patient populations and perform ‘what-if’ analyses in real-time. Users of the platform are presented with aggregate views, but each data point in the TriNetX network can be traced to healthcare organizations who have the ability to identify patients, allowing clinical researchers to develop virtual patient cohorts for potential recruitment into a clinical trial.”
Institutions and companies to join the network recently include Sanofi, Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
As an example of TriNetX’s services, the company announced on February 13, 2018, that it had developed a chemotherapy lines of treatment identification algorithm. “Being able to identify which line of chemotherapy treatment corresponds to which subset of a patient’s data is truly a breakthrough in oncology data analytics,” said Jack London, Informatics Research Professor and Informatics Director, Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University, in a statement. “This type of information is not tracked in traditional EMRs or any other system today. The ability of TriNetX to deliver this data provides huge benefits for both biopharma companies and healthcare organizations in their data driven analyses.”
TriNetX’s platform gives its clients access to integrated data from electronic medical records (EMR), tumor registries, unstructured pathology reports using natural language processing, and molecular genomics data. It also can predict how many new patients will be eligible for a clinical trial in the next 12 months on a site-by-site basis.
The network members receive hardware and software that integrates within the companies’ own IT infrastructure, and often utilizes existing data resources like i2b2 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP).
Which emphasizes the extent to which biopharma relies on big data, and as a result, on data scientists, one of the hot new fields in the industry. For example, IBM has projected that by 2020, the number of jobs for all data professionals in the U.S. will increase by 364,000 job openings to 2,720,000. The fastest-growing job titles in the field are Data Scientists and Advanced Analysts, which are expected to grow by 28 percent by 2020.
Gadi Lachman, TriNetX’s chief executive officer, said in a statement, “Our members are liberating data that is trapped within disparate databases all around the world and through our platform, we’re able to provide researchers with access to rich, longitudinal and harmonized data. We are honored that Pfizer has selected us as a digital partner to help in its strategic initiative to leverage real world data across its organization, from drug development to outcomes and healthcare research.”
