How Researchers at Biopharma Companies and Academia Can Gain Better Insights into Real-World Clinical Phenotype Data To Improve Clinical Development

Precision medicine is an exciting area of innovation for researchers in academia and industry. It holds the promise of better outcomes for patients, and it is changing the way patients experience disease and treatment.

By definition, the patient population for a targeted medicine is smaller than that of the disease category as a whole. Medicines affect patients differently.1 Even in a condition as widespread as diabetes, diagnosed in 21 million people in the US2, 43 percent of patients do not respond to initial treatment.1 In conditions with smaller patient populations, the subset of one phenotype of patient versus another can be small indeed.

The burden of precision medicine researchers is to design clinical studies targeting the specific clinical patient phenotype for which the treatment is expected to be most effective. Due to the current clinical research infrastructure, most patients are recruited into studies from a pool of academic centers. But the current system often may not provide researchers with enough diversity for the study.

Importantly, even earlier in the R&D process, researchers may not have access to enough data to identify all of the correct clinical phenotypes of patients who should be benefiting the most from the new medical developments. Currently, such information and data are hard to get.

At the same time, a 2013 Research!America poll showed that 72 percent of Americans said they would likely participate in research if recommended by their doctor. The same survey showed that 74 percent are willing to share privacy-protected personal health information to help researchers better understand disease and develop new ways to prevent, treat and cure them.3

Novaseek bridges this gap by connecting researchers with real-world clinical data for much improved discovery or study design as well as observational studies. The process is intuitive and straightforward using Novaseek’s cloud-based Clinical Data Network for Research (CDNR) platform.

CDNR interfaces easily with hospital data sources, enabling researchers to define patients and patient cohorts based on detailed clinical criteria and request biospecimens highly annotated with clinical data from consented patients. Researchers gain access to health insights and the biospecimens necessary for research and clinical studies success, based on better understanding of patient populations. CDNR is an important tool in the quest to make more effective therapies available to patients sooner.


1. http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org/Userfiles/PMC-Corporate/file/pmc_the_case_for_personalized_medicine.pdf
2. http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics/2014statisticsreport.html
3. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/poll-majority-of-americans-would-participate-in-clinical-trials-if-recommended-by-doctor