An Interview with UCB’s Peter Verdru

Last month, PatientsLikeMe announced our partnership with biopharma leader, UCB, to launch a new community for people with epilepsy.  Below is an interview with UCB’s Vice President of Clinical Research, Peter Verdru, MD.  David S. Williams III, head of PatientsLikeMe business development, recently spoke with Peter about the forthcoming epilepsy community, adverse event reporting, and the partnership in general.

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581
(David) UCB is known as The Epilepsy Company.  What’s your goal in partnering with PatientsLikeMe to create a new community for people with epilepsy?
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(Peter) As patient-centric companies, UCB and PatientsLikeMe are both committed to advancing research and improving the lives of people with life-changing conditions.  UCB has a long-term commitment to the epilepsy community – so a partnership with an organization like PatientsLikeMe seemed only natural.

Our goal with this partnership is to provide this community to patients with epilepsy to help them manage their disease. Additionally, the community will generate patient-reported outcomes that may help UCB better understand how patients live with epilepsy and help advance epilepsy care. We anticipate patient-reported outcomes data across treatment groups for seizure severity, number of seizures, symptoms, adverse events, health-related quality of life, and co-morbidities, among other things. Using this knowledge for our future clinical research programs would be a logical next step, leading to an even better understanding of what future treatments could offer or what type of patients would gain additional benefit.

581 (David) This partnership is said to give patients a voice in advancing research.  How so?
pvh-1-3 (Peter) This community will give patients the tools they need to measure their own outcomes. Participants will record their real-time, day-to-day progress in controlling their seizures and achieving their treatment goals, and share that with the community to help other patients, caregivers, researchers and industry learn more about the disease. Tracking their disease over the long-term may help patients and physicians work together to evaluate the impact of their treatment. Eventually, clinical research programs might also benefit from the long-term data these patients are sharing.
581 (David) Through the partnership, both companies will be working to design and deploy a system that allows for adverse event reporting to the FDA.  Why?
pvh-1-3 (Peter) UCB has an ethical and legal responsibility to report adverse events associated with our drugs. If adverse events for any UCB drugs are mentioned on the site, UCB is required to report these directly to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Therefore, we are working to develop and deploy a solution that will allow us to assess and process potential adverse events, report them to the FDA, and capture them in the UCB safety database.
581 (David) What’s the most exciting part of this initiative for UCB?
pvh-1-3 (Peter) We’re excited to be taking a leadership role in the pharmaceutical industry to create a community that will give patients a forum for showing their treatment outcomes. Patients are really the experts about how epilepsy impacts their lives.

UCB is focused on bringing new treatments to patients with severe diseases like epilepsy. We sincerely believe this unique partnership will bring real value to the large community of patients, families and caregivers

581 (David) Thanks Peter!
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2 thoughts on “An Interview with UCB’s Peter Verdru”

  1. David and Peter I am so excited to get Epilepsy going. I had two grand mal seizures in 1996 and died twice. I have lived a normal life without seizure meds since 1998. Until a week ago when I went down for two hours with a seizure. I am now a Parkinson patient of 3 years and a once again epilepsy patient and the research between the two is huge…love pokie

  2. Pingback: The Value of Openness: The PatientsLikeMe Blog » Sharing, Openness…and Privacy?

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