With the emer­gence of re­al-world ev­i­dence as a promis­ing way to cap­ture da­ta points out­side of clin­i­cal tri­als and speed up drug de­vel­op­ment, con­tract re­search or­ga­ni­za­tions — the stal­warts of tra­di­tion­al tri­al ex­e­cu­tion — are of­ten lead­ing the charge in adopt­ing new tech­nol­o­gy. Parex­el, a lead­ing play­er in the field, is step­ping up that com­mit­ment through a deal with Data­vant.

Jamie Mac­don­ald

Spawned by Vivek Ra­maswamy’s start­up fac­to­ry Roivant and led by Travis May, Data­vant has po­si­tioned it­self as a key ag­gre­ga­tor link­ing up the dis­parate datasets that ex­ist in health­care, of­ten in si­los. In the new part­ner­ship, its soft­ware will be in­te­grat­ed in­to Parex­el’s work­flow such that all the da­ta from their stud­ies will be con­nect­ed to re­al-world da­ta such as elec­tron­ic health records, claims and di­ag­nos­tics, as well as in­for­ma­tion re­lat­ing to ge­nomics, wear­able de­vices, so­cioe­co­nom­ic and be­hav­ioral da­ta and oth­ers.

All the da­ta gen­er­at­ed in the process are al­so quick­ly de-iden­ti­fied — one of Data­vant’s key pitch­es amid in­creas­ing con­cerns about pa­tient pri­va­cy.

“(O)ne of the most sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­ers to gen­er­at­ing re­al-world ev­i­dence is over­com­ing lim­i­ta­tions of sin­gle da­ta sources,” Parex­el CEO Jamie Mac­don­ald said in a state­ment. “Part­ner­ing with Data­vant has pro­vid­ed Parex­el the abil­i­ty to link dis­parate da­ta sets to dri­ve the com­plex analy­ses nec­es­sary for pro­vid­ing in­no­v­a­tive sci­en­tif­ic and clin­i­cal da­ta strate­gies.”

Travis May

Mac­don­ald be­gan work­ing with Data­vant last Sep­tem­ber, a few months af­ter he took the helm. Af­ter ham­mer­ing out how best to in­cor­po­rate Data­vant’s tech in­to Parex­el’s way of de­sign­ing and con­duct­ing tri­als, the duo has agreed to for­mal­ly ex­pand the re­la­tion­ship in­to a mul­ti-year strate­gic pact.

The use of re­al-world ev­i­dence has gained steam as bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies look to trim the cost of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and ad­vo­cate for a sort of pa­tient-cen­tric nar­ra­tive in which their day-to-day ex­pe­ri­ence with ther­a­pies can be tak­en in­to reg­u­la­to­ry ac­count. The FDA kick-start­ed its own pi­lot projects to eval­u­ate whether RWE can help pre­dict the re­sults of clin­i­cal tri­als that have yet to wrap up. The dis­cus­sion is still lim­it­ed to drugs al­ready on the mar­ket — for which de­vel­op­ers might be seek­ing la­bel changes — and ques­tions about da­ta qual­i­ty stan­dards re­main, but the mo­men­tum is there to cre­ate new ways to build a fran­chise treat­ment.

So­cial im­age: Jamie Mac­don­ald, Travis May

The IPO engine is thriving, never mind the rampage of the coronavirus crisis on R&D timelines.

On Friday, along with synthetic lethality-focused biotech Repare Therapeutics, another Bristol Myers partner Forma Therapeutics also unveiled its plans to vault on to the Nasdaq — penciling in a target of $150 million.

The Watertown, Massachusetts-based company — which poached senior Genentech executive Frank Lee to take over the reins last year after more than a decade under founder Steve Tregay — raised a plump $100 million late last year, while shepherding its sickle cell disease (SCD) drug through an early-stage trial.

For the first time in 12 years, the FDA has approved a new frontline treatment for the most common form of liver cancer.

The agency okayed a combination of Roche’s anti-VEGF antibody Avastin and their immunotherapy Tecentriq for patients with unresectable or metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The approval comes two weeks after Roche and their big biotech sub Genentech published Phase III results showing the combo improved both progression-free survival and, crucially, helped patients live longer than the long-running standard-of-care, Bayer’s Nexavar.

With a Bristol Myers Squibb endorsement in tow, Versant-backed cancer drug developer Repare Therapeutics has set its sights on a Nasdaq debut.

On Friday, the Montreal-based company with operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts that is yet to enter the clinic, unveiled plans for a $100 million IPO, banking on its “synthetic lethality” platform.

The basic idea is to target the genetic basis of tumors, a common idea across precision oncology medicines. But instead of targeting the perpetrator mutation directly, the compound is designed to go after the other gene in the gene pair. The rationale is based on the decades-old genetic principle that indicates two mutations are lethal only when combined together.