Big data ‘road map’ launched by ABPI
pharmafile | November 22, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | ABPI, BMA, NIHR, data, transparency
The ABPI has launched a new initiative that aims to harness the potential of big data to improve patient care and increase investment in the UK.
The pharma lobby group says its new big data ‘road map’ is calling for a cross-sector response across healthcare, academia and the pharma industry to help achieve this end.
Big data is the term for a collection of large and complex datasets that are not easily processed by traditional methods.
In health this relates to the mass of data coming from patients, such as the 53 million people in England who will potentially use the NHS throughout their life, or the electronic records of US patients which can be shared with pharma firms.
By using more data and delving deeper into areas like genomics on a larger scale, the industry hopes to gain new insights into how diseases work and hopefully translate this into new medicines.
It may also change the way R&D is done in the future, as the initial focus could stop being on finding a molecule as the first port of call – but instead focus on a population of patients and design drugs around them.
The ABPI is keen to get the UK industry and the NHS on track by using big data to its highest potential, and has launched the road map as a four-point plan to direct progress over the next four years.
These areas are: increasing awareness; building capabilities and capacity; creating sustainable data ecosystems; and accelerating high-value opportunities.
The ABPI says that the road map is “a clear vision of the future possibilities within the life sciences and healthcare spanning the full value chain from drug discovery to healthcare delivery”.
Future possibilities that are highlighted in the plan include enhanced therapeutic target identification, virtual drug design, modelling personalised medicines (notably in cancer) and patient pathway redesign.
Data and transparency
The road map was launched at the ABPI’s bi-annual conference at the BMA House in London yesterday, where its chief executive Stephen Whitehead said: “The next big thing is here – and it’s big data.”
But the elephant in the room was the issue of clinical trial transparency. The single largest contribution pharma could make toward a big data revolution would be to publish all of its data, but the industry (and the ABPI) are resisting calls from pressure groups to do this.
Whitehead made an attempt to quash this obvious quandary by asking the rhetorical question: “Could pharma be an enemy of change because of trial transparency?” – he answered no, saying that pharma was “already publishing 90% of its data” but admitted it needed to grow to 100 per cent.
“The legal and ethical challenges will arise from big data, but we must push forward,” he argued, and praised the moves by the UK government to open up NHS patient data for life science firms’ consumption.
He said that big data “will also shift the power base in health toward the patient and away from traditional healthcare professionals” and added that the NHS needed to be both aware and accepting of this revolution.
In the future, “the patient may become someone who isn’t ill but instead new technologies will follow them through their life helping with health,” he argued, saying there could be a time when small chips attached to patients could tell their doctor everything about them, and what preventative methods may be used to help them avoid certain health risks.
He concluded by saying: “The industry must respond to big data and if we can, we can revolutionise care for patients.”
Ben Adams
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