by Nick Hudson
LONDON, Nov 18 (APM) - As patient data plays an increasingly important role in innovating and pricing drugs, it will need to be standardised across the pharma industry, a conference has heard.
Novartis's CEO Joseph Jimenez told the FT Global Pharmaceutical and biotechnology conference in London on Monday, there is too much poor quality data generally in the industry.
"Data has to be quality, standardised and synthesised. There is a lot of data which is rubbish, you can't make sense out of it." He stressed the industry needs to work out how best to use it.
He and Shire CEO Dr Flemming Ornskov said there would be increasing moves to use data gathered from monitor patients remotely. Jimenez said that with data being increasingly used to determine outcomes, pharma would increasingly have to link up with technology companies.
"Pharma companies would not have to own those businesses. We do not know a lot about remote patient monitoring, but other companies do."
Ornskov said use of new technology and remote monitoring of patients in their homes would be a "smart way to manage costs". Keeping patients out of hospital where they risk infection is crucial, he argued.
The benefits of home monitoring of patients were echoed by Glen de Vries, president of Medidata. He gave the example of a cancer patient being monitored remotely. This provided a "real-world picture" of the patients physical movements and whether he or she was able to move from room to room, so demonstrating a drug's socio-economic benefits.
Providing real-world data of a patient's activity would influence the price of a drug because it could have an impact on gross domestic product, he added.
Hanno Ronte, partner at Monitor Deloitte told the conference data needs to be used in a much more sophisticated way, with pricing linked much more closely to how a drug benefits patients. "Patients will become consumers of health, there will be more demand on outcomes." Data's value would be crucial for predictive analysis, he said.
Data on drugs will become much more accessible and continuous, said Michael Doherty, global head of regulatory affairs at Hoffmann La-Roche. Everyone in the drug development process, from patients to payers, will have access to that data, he said.
"I see it as inevitable. It makes sense to have access to a large database", adding that it would be continuous as the patient responds "through the whole life of the drug".
A number of speakers spoke of their enthusiasm for what they said is the inevitability of the growing role 'big data' will play in innovation and pricing. The conference heard patients will be equally enthusiastic to share their health data, as long as anonymity could be guaranteed.
Doherty said the existing "one size fits all" system will change to a more flexible approach. Bahija Jallal, executive vice president of AstraZeneca's MedImmune, agreed, saying pricing of drugs needs to move towards an "holistic, value-based model".
Glen De Vries, president of Medidata, suggested the pharma industry is poor at collecting all relevant data from clinical trials. "We are not very good at getting information out of information. We are very poor at optimising the R&D process."
He said the real "elephant in the R&D room" is that randomised control trials are not used to their full potential, although he conceded safety data are gathered effectively.
Tom Pike, chief executive of Quintiles, said much more could done with the data, highlighting the example of high responders in sub populations. "We can pull out real-world data. It's all about analytics, but we need to ask the right questions."
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