Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is using a database of anonymous patient data to identify key aspects of diseases to study in clinical trials.
The company, headquartered in New York City, is using its Precision Medicine Analytics Ecosystem to more closely tailor its drug trials. By collecting de-identified patient data, researchers are studying trends in symptoms and biological markers of diabetes, fibromyalgia, lupus and other chronic conditions to develop better treatments, according to an article in Forbes by Geno Germano, group president of Pfizer's global innovation pharma business.
"Ultimately, understanding which patients to include will help us complete our clinical trials in a shorter timeframe and deliver a medicine in an area where there hasn't been a new treatment option in 50 years," Mr. Germano wrote.
The database is built on an open-source platform developed for Johnson & Johnson. It contains hundreds of million of anonymous records and can visualize trends in the data with a software tool.