Litmus Health said yesterday that it launched its clinical data science platform into public beta. The company hopes to use big data from wearables and connected devices to help inform endpoints for Phase I & II clinical trials.
The goal of its platform, according to Litmus, is to get pharmaceuticals to market faster by putting health-related quality of life as the primary motivation for clinical development. Massive sets of data collected from wearables will help to inform researchers about their patients quality of life outside the clinic.
The platform supports 200 data sources and can draw from a library of validated patient surveys to access large data sets. Researchers who use the Litmus platform can customize their data sources to the needs of their trial. Litmus uses machine learning to integrate data sources and identify correlations between behavior, environment, and outcomes. Researchers can access an individual participant’s data or take a look at how the trial is doing at a population level. The platform also has a mobile app available for iOS and Adriod that serves to gather and sends device data to the platform.
“The answers we need are everywhere around us,” Litmus chief science officer Dr. Samuel Volchenboum, director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago, said in prepared remarks. “We need a better way to collect data in clinical research. Smartphones, wearables, and home sensors present a unique opportunity. Most researchers understand the value of patient-generated information collected at the point of experience, but they have no good way to harness those data. The ability to measure outcomes in multiple dimensions, remotely, is key. Litmus helps research teams and their sponsors make more confident go/no-go decisions.”
“These devices are already in the hands of consumers,” added CEO Daphne Kis. “The challenge is to credibly accommodate the data they collect. We have the opportunity to help researchers understand patients and their quality of life as we never have before, and the market is ready. These data are going to have huge implications for the healthcare ecosystem and for how we use patient data both in the clinical trials setting and beyond. In the not too distant future, the entire world will be 1 big clinical trial.”
The company’s platform is undergoing a pilot study at the University of Chicago, where gastroenterologist Dr. David Rubin is studying the effects of activity, sleep, and diet on patients with inflammatory bowel disease. “We all want to collect higher quality, more accurate data from patients in our clinical trials,” Rubin said. “Litmus is the first platform I’ve seen that actually delivers.”
