AstraZeneca and PatientsLikeMe announced today that they’re working together to use patient-reported data to shape future medicines and help improve patient outcomes. While it focuses on an initial set of four therapeutic areas (lupus, respiratory diseases, oncology and diabetes) the partnership signals a significant step forward for patients worldwide. Bruce Cooper, AstraZeneca’s Senior Vice President, Global Medical Affairs and Ed Godber, PatientsLikeMe’s Executive Vice President of Life Sciences Ventures explain why.
What is this partnership designed to do?
Bruce Cooper: We’re focused more than ever on having patient-defined value drive our scientific developments. To do so, we need to understand more about what patients are experiencing day-to-day. Our partnership with PatientsLikeMe allows us to tap into a patient network with more than 325,000 members. Every minute of every day, they are using the website to track their condition and give others like them information and support. They’re also contributing data for research. Now, their shared experiences will become real world evidence that accelerates AstraZeneca’s R&D capability and delivers patient-centric medicines.
Ed Godber: Ultimately, we want to help AstraZeneca partner with patients so that patients shape the medicines of the future, those medicines lead to better outcomes, and patients can live the lives they want. It’s exciting to see how Briggs Morrison (Executive Vice President, Global Medicines Development, AstraZeneca) and his team have truly committed themselves to transforming the discovery and development process by focusing on what patients experience, and need.
How does this collaboration actually help patients?
Bruce Cooper: We have significant potential to accelerate an upgrade to the system by making the patient voice part of the DNA of life science processes, helping to generate evidence to support our R&D and drive our science. We want to better understand what is important to patients about all aspects of their condition and treatment, and then shape the profile of the medicines we discover and develop. And we want to empower patients to thrive to the fullest degree from this upgrade in how data is generated and shared.
Ed Godber: We’re really aligned on that point. PatientsLikeMe was founded more than ten years ago with a mission to put patients first, and to make their voice central to medical advances. We did that by enabling patients to learn from the experience of thousands of others like them, sharing important and varied information about their health in a way that is compatible with healthcare and research. We’ve already seen that this kind of sharing can improve patient outcomes and transform healthcare. So it’s important that we take “patientomics” to the next level. With AstraZeneca, we not only expand the network and data, but also develop the science and processes by which healthcare and discovery can be increasingly responsive to patient needs.
What’s the first thing you’ll focus on as you begin to work together?
Ed Godber: We have been able to quickly get into a rhythm of sharing innovation and best practice around how to integrate the patient voice into AstraZeneca’s R&D. From here, in the short term, we’ll work together to create a “how to” guide to incorporate patient centricity into the design and execution of our studies. The agreement is for five years, so we’ll continue to define and evolve what we focus on.
Bruce Cooper: I’m pleased to say too that we have begun to collaborate with clinical operations to integrate patient insights into trial design and execution. We also expect our medical strategies to be enhanced across our Therapy Areas. There are a number of areas that can benefit from the data that PatientsLikeMe generates, and I’m looking forward to exploring even more.
What does the future look like with this partnership in place?
Bruce Cooper: I see a world where patients are even more engaged in research, because they have greater access to it, and can shape the way we conduct research with them. I also see patients helping to shape the healthcare environment as a whole by bringing what’s important to them onto the government’s healthcare agenda, and even shaping the way healthcare is delivered in clinical practice in disease communities.
Ed Godber: We believe this can have a significant impact on the speed at which patients get the full value out of new and effective medicines in the real world, using all of the useful data about a patient’s experience at the right times in disease research, drug development, regulation, access and care.
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