MMS Holdings, a Michigan-based CRO, is partnering with MIT Julia Lab and the University of Maryland to form the Health Analytics Collective with the aim of shortening the time it takes to bring pharmaceuticals and medical devices to market.
The newly formed group is looking to leverage real-world evidence and observational data collected during routine clinical practice with patient healthcare databases to augment label claims as well as support new drug applications and medical devices. The group, which was announced in MIT News, will be based at the Center for Translational Medicine at the University of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy.
In order to reduce the number of required clinical trials, the group will sift through a wide variety of data sets by using Julia, an MIT-incubated programming language that can solve large computational problems quickly and accurately.
“Using real-world evidence for the purposes of regulatory drug approvals is an innovative approach that can be applied to support a wide variety of healthcare decisions,” Uma Sharma, MMS’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement. “This group’s combined efforts will give sponsors of clinical trials that ability to bring safe, life-changing therapies to patients much more quickly.”
With real-world evidence and a deep understanding of areas that lack regulatory precedence, the team will be able to help guide a company’s business decisions with insights into a potential asset’s life-cycle management and due-diligence efforts in order to reduce the development period of lifesaving drugs.