Novartis forges forward into digital pharma with FocalView app
pharmafile | April 25, 2018 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | FocalView, Novartis, biotech, drugs, pharma, pharmaceutical
There is a growing trend in big pharma to talk up the potential for digital technology to revolutionise operations and Novartis is one of the companies that is most actively announcing steps to explore this possibility.
In August of last year, the company announced a new position, Chief Digital Officer, and the man to take the position, in Bertrand Bodson.
In the latest step to ramp up this push, Novartis has revealed that it has launched a new app, called FocalView. The app uses the Apple ResearchKit platform and is designed so that those with ophthalmic diseases can self-report on their conditions from the comfort of their own homes.
The data captured could potentially revolutionise the way clinical trials take place, opening up the possibility for a majority of analysis to be conducted by the patients themselves.
The hope would be that it could streamline the clinical trial process, as well as offering convenience to participants and thereby potentially improve recruitment and retention to trials.
“Optimising digital technology in research and development, particularly in ophthalmic disease, could have a marked impact on the quality of the data we capture,” said Bertrand Bodson, Novartis Chief Digital Officer. “We believe apps like FocalView, which we’ve made freely available to the research community on an open-source platform, can help accelerate the development of treatments and bring them to the patients who need them most.”
The app will now be tested in a non-interventional study to determine its efficacy and usability in determining visual function – in particular, the app has been designed to tested visual acuity and contrast sensitivity.
Beyond this, it will be tested for accuracy against conventional clinical analysis to determine whether it could be used as an effective alternative to having patients return to clinical trial sites for examinations.
If the app is found to be effective, it could open the possibility of gathering more real-world and patient-reported data than is currently gathered thereby offering certain advantages over traditional clinical trials.
Ben Hargreaves
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