Imagine being able to weave patient information together with clinical trial data to identify new treatments and accurately target the patients who will benefit. New York City-based MEDIDATA, now the third-largest brand of Dassault Systèmes, is making it possible, providing services to accelerate clinical trials, reduce risk and leverage advanced technologies to make precision medicine a reality for everyone.
“If you’re making better decisions in the drug development process, you’re going to get better results and people will have better lives,” said Tarek Sherif, co-CEO and co-founder of MEDIDATA.
MEDIDATA creates a “digital fabric” of anonymized data from many sources, including nearly 20,000 clinical trials and more than 5 million patients. It then applies advanced analytics, including artificial intelligence (AI), to identify patterns and insights and develop predictive models. All clinical trials that the company supports are digital and cloud-based, so the data is available to be reused and analyzed without losing the context of the original trial conditions.
The process is already yielding meaningful results. Castleman Disease, a rare, difficult to diagnose, life-threatening disorder, is a perfect example. “We used clinical trial data and the molecular data of patients enrolled in different studies,” said Glen de Vries, co-CEO and co-founder of MEDIDATA. “By identifying the biomarker that matches a drug with patients who respond to it, we were able to increase that drug’s effectiveness from 19% to 65%. That’s the kind of precision we all want to benefit from as patients in the future.”
Now, the integration of MEDIDATA’s clinical trial platform with Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE business innovation platform will enable the companies’ pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device customers to connect the dots between research, development, manufacturing, clinical trials and commercial deployment. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform also can be used to create scientifically accurate 3D virtual twins of the human body, supporting research and delivery of targeted, personalized medicine in a fraction of the time required for physical tests— without exposing humans or animals to unproven drugs.
“We are going to deliver the next-generation scientific and business platform for the life sciences industry,” de Vries said. “There’s huge excitement in combining MEDIDATA’s end-to-end clinical development solutions with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This will power new ways of accelerating the entire drug and device development process, from early research and discovery to commercialization and manufacturing.”
Empowered by advanced data, collaboration and simulation capabilities, de Vries said, the models used to evaluate drugs across the development spectrum can be further enhanced with in-use data, generated after the drugs reach the market. This creates a continuous loop of improvement and discovery.
“This will be a catalyst for the development, management and delivery of new therapies,” de Vries said. “It will enable better healthcare for patients, more and better science around treatments, and improved drug reimbursement in a value- based care environment.”
