Discover real-world implications of multiple myeloma therapies
When bringing treatments to market, life sciences organizations rely on in-depth, clinically rich data to develop critical insights and evidence.
One of SmartAnalyst’s customers is a pharmaceutical company that develops and manufactures targeted therapies for multiple myeloma, a cancer that forms in a type of white blood cell called a plasma cell.
Researchers from the pharmaceutical company had questions about how long patients stay on different lines of treatment and what circumstances lead physicians to switch patients’ treatment regimens. Specifically, the company wanted to see how patients were being treated in the real world by describing the different treatment patterns associated with multiple myeloma. The company was also interested in how treatment outcomes for its therapy compare with those of competing therapies, with the goal of increasing physician adoption of its products.
Typical randomized, controlled studies are both costly and time consuming. SmartAnalyst’s customer had already committed a large amount of resources to bringing its medications to market, and it needed a research partner that could provide high-quality real-world treatment pattern results quickly and economically.
IBM® Explorys® includes EHR data on more than
unique patients
Explorys data has been used in
of studies
The depth and breadth of the Explorys data enable us to conduct high-quality scientific research at a fraction of the cost of using clinical trial data.
The depth and breadth of the Explorys data enable us to conduct high-quality scientific research at a fraction of the cost of using clinical trial data.
According to Eros Papademetriou, Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) Senior Director at SmartAnalyst, the IBM Watson Health® team held the key to easily answering its customer’s questions. The cloud-based Explorys offerings for life sciences data set includes living, de-identified longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data on more than 54 million unique patients recorded by 344,000 unique providers at the time the research was conducted.
“With Explorys, we were able to identify a large cohort of patients who are new to the disease,” says Papademetriou. “We wanted to start looking at them early in their diagnosis and treatment. We were able to use the Explorys data to get a baseline on these patients and then follow them through their disease progression.”
The Explorys data revealed encouraging results for SmartAnalyst’s customer. The company was able to see how often its drug was used and at what phase of the treatment. Further, among the different therapeutic agents examined in the study, the customer’s therapy showed better time-to-event outcomes than the other drugs. This may indicate that SmartAnalyst’s customer’s treatment is more tolerable at longer exposure than other agents in the study. The next step, says Papademetriou, is to determine whether these results lead to other favorable clinical outcomes.
SmartAnalyst and its customer plan to continue using Explorys data to investigate the real-world implications of multiple myeloma therapies for several key reasons. As Papademetriou explains, “The Explorys lab data is more complete and more in-depth than what we can get with other data sets.” Further, the Explorys data set includes specifics about a wide variety of patient attributes, such as demographics, comorbidities, previous treatments, lab results, vital signs, and biomarkers.
“The depth and breadth of the Explorys data enable us to conduct high-quality scientific research at a fraction of the cost of using clinical trial data,” Papademetriou notes.
The pharmaceutical company is using the Explorys study findings to develop ways to encourage more physicians to employ its treatments, and it has already submitted five scientific abstracts to industry conferences. According to Papademetriou, sharing these results will have a long-reaching positive impact. “It will definitely help our client from a marketing perspective. But it’s also an important step toward finding the most effective way to combat multiple myeloma.”
Watson Health is a data, analytics and technology partner for the health industry. Supported by the innovation of IBM and intelligence of Watson, we are committed to helping build smarter health ecosystems. Through the combination of our deep industry expertise in health, data and analytics, actionable insights, and reputation for security and trust, Watson Health is working together with its clients and partners to help them achieve simpler processes, better care insights, faster breakthroughs and improved experiences for people around the world. Learn more at ibm.com/watson-health.
Watson Health is a data, analytics and technology partner for the health industry. Supported by the innovation of IBM and intelligence of Watson, we are committed to helping build smarter health ecosystems. Through the combination of our deep industry expertise in health, data and analytics, actionable insights, and reputation for security and trust, Watson Health is working together with its clients and partners to help them achieve simpler processes, better care insights, faster breakthroughs and improved experiences for people around the world. Learn more at ibm.com/watson-health.
