Sanofi Collaborates with Duke University and Massachusetts General Hospital

Sanofi US announced on April 27, 2016 it will collaborate with Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and, separately, with the Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH) at Massachusetts General Hospital. The collaborations are designed to create new tools that will help predict how people with Type 2 diabetes adhere to their medication, the company said in a press announcement.

"The DCRI's collaboration with Sanofi has the potential to transform chronic disease population management by analyzing how predictive analytics-big data-might forecast medication adherence and result in more personalized patient adherence programs," said Michael Pencina, PhD, director of biostatistics at the DCRI.

According to Sanofi, the goal of the collaborations is to improve patient health outcomes, drug development, clinical trial design, and quality of care. CATCH and the DCRI are utilizing novel machine learning methods to extract patient insights. These insights are being captured by large-scale use of anonymized individual patient level data.

The collaborations are exploring more accurate models that capture non-traditional data measures-including prescription fill, socio-geographic, and behavioral, Sanofi says. For example, Sanofi says, if a geographical community exhibits characteristics that are shown to have a correlation with lower medication adherence, these characteristics could be used to more effectively tailor approaches to patient engagement. Patient outreach in those communities could be adapted accordingly and intensified. The goal is to better anticipate patient-specific drug adherence, improve prediction of clinical outcomes, and guide future clinical trial designs.

Source: Sanofi