Hey Guys - I wanted to ask you what are BurstIQ's goals regarding contribution to the areas of medical research and major pharma clinical studies? Any timelines on working with major pharmaceutical brands and disclosing which companies you are planning to work with?
Hi bitcoinjames6, we are definitely planning on working with medical research and major pharma companies. We currently have a relationship with UCHealth CARE Innovation Center (on the Anschutz Medical Campus) on the research side. Once the consumer interface is launched, we plan to engage with several major pharma companies. We're staggering the engagements this way on purpose - the biggest interest from pharma companies will be access to individuals - both for marketing of existing treatments and for clinical trial recruitment. So we want to make sure we have consumers on the platform before we bring on pharma companies.
But there are several major draws for academic researchers, pharma and biotech to a platform like ours:
First, the platform allows academic researchers, commercial researchers and CROs to directly reach people who fit the participant profile for their study. Typically, researchers find study participants in one of two ways: they either advertise the study on general channels (e.g., on the Internet) and hope that people will see it and contact them; or, providers and clinical research coordinators identify potential participants and talk with them about the opportunity. With the BurstIQ platform, researchers can query the system to find people who fit a certain medical, genomic or other profile. The system will return a list of people who fit that profile and have “opted-in” to learn about research. Then they can reach out to those people directly. This saves researchers a huge amount of time, energy and expense.
Second, the platform allows researchers to access large data sets far more easily than would otherwise be possible. Usually, researchers download data from multiple repositories separately. Often, this means additional cost and a lengthy contract process. Then the researcher has to parse and clean and standardize that data before they can even start the actual research. The whole process can take months. The BurstIQ platform allows researchers to access large data sets with one API, and the data is already parsed, cleaned and standardized.
Third, because the platform enables machine intelligence and deep learning, researchers can do more with the data. Associations and trends can be uncovered that lead to new discoveries, study participant profiles can be refined and stratified, treatments can be applied with more specificity, and data about human behavior and other non-medical factors can inform clinical studies.
Fourth, commercial biotech and pharma companies can market products directly to highly receptive audiences. Instead of mass outreach through print, online and TV advertising, companies can identify people who fit the medical profile for a particular drug and offer discounts or rebates directly to those individuals.
Fifth, the platform allows researchers to find others who are working in similar fields and collaborate. Research results can be shared with other researchers without compromising intellectual property rights or the privacy of the individuals participating in the study.
And finally, the BurstIQ platform eliminates the need for intermediary CTMS systems that act as a liaison between health system EHRs and biopharma companies’ clinical data repositories. These intermediary CTMS systems are often rife with missing or incorrect data, and correcting or preventing these mistakes requires significant manual labor and training.
In terms of disclosing who we're working with, we'll make those announcements when the partnerships are finalized.
