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PicnicHealth Announces Strategic Partnership with Roche to Generate Scientific Insights from Real World Data
PicnicHealth, the venture-backed startup that gives patients unprecedented access to their medical records and the ability to contribute to scientific research, is announcing a strategic partnership with Roche and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group.
PicnicHealth is gathering medical records data from proactively consenting patients, de-identifying it to ensure patient data privacy (HIPAA and CCPA compliant) and then aggregating it with the goal of deepening the scientific understanding of serious diseases. In the partnership with Roche and Genentech, the companies are working together to generate insights that can be used to advance the development of treatments for better patient outcomes. Following initial efforts focused on multiple sclerosis (MS), PicnicHealth, Roche and Genentech recently expanded their collaboration to support Huntington’s disease (HD), paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH), and hemophilia.
In MS, for example, the companies are working together in a multi-year collaboration that combines over seven years of retrospective medical record data with five years of prospective data for 5,000 patients. The multi-modal data set combines real-world clinical outcomes with MRI images in MS, and allows a deeper understanding of the natural history and progression of such a complex, heterogeneous disease. The data brings together patients’ experiences across all sites of care and will help facilitate a better understanding of MS treatment patterns and therapeutic outcomes in the real world.
“At PicnicHealth we are proud to work together with patients to unlock the important information from medical records that is usually stored in disparate and disorganized systems, and leveraging it to advance research,” said Noga Leviner, CEO PicnicHealth. “We’re excited to connect our deep understanding of patient data with the scientific expertise of Roche and Genentech in a joint quest to create personalized treatments for patients.”
James Sabry, Head of Roche Pharma Partnering stated, “Our strategic partnership with PicnicHealth will allow us to better understand serious diseases and accelerate development of effective treatments tailored to the individual needs of patients. By combining PicnicHealth’s uniquely built and curated real-world data sets with groundbreaking science we are aiming to make personalized healthcare a reality across multiple therapeutic areas. ”
Advancing Medical Research with Machine Learning
PicnicHealth uses advanced human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITL ML) to structure medical record data including typical EMR fields, like labs and diagnoses, and also disease-specific elements abstracted from doctors’ notes and reports. As part of the collaboration, data is enriched with unique additions including MRI images, patient-reported outcomes (PROs), and linkage to data outside of the medical records. The approach of working directly with patients, who go through an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved consent process and get access to PicincHealth’s medical record management platform as a benefit of participation, allows PicnicHealth to get records from every site of care for each individual patient. The HITL technology platform, which combines PicnicHealth’s proprietary algorithms with human curation, enables PicnicHealth to ingest and make meaningful use of records from any medical facility in the US, in any format, regardless of hospital system or what electronic medical record system they use.
