2022 Pistoia Alliance Annual European Conference

Pistoia Alliance’s Annual European Conference: Driving Patient Centricity in R&D

The voice of the empowered patient is on the rise. Through a series of keynote presentations, focused discussions, and breakout sessions, the Pistoia Alliance’s Annual European Conference focused on Patient Centricity in R&D in an effort to look at the challenges and opportunities for embedding patient centricity within the biopharma value chain—from early discovery right through to post commercialization and its potential for real-world data insights.

Janssen’s digital health catalogue helps researchers find new tools, benefits patients

During his keynote speech at the Pistoia Alliance London conference, Kai Langel, Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at Janssen, showed how his company is perfectly aligned with Pistoia’s mission to collaborate and innovate.

Langel outlined a digital health initiative called DEEP (Digital Endpoints Ecosystem Protocol), which, may soon come under the Pistoia Alliance umbrella in order to expand and offer more resources to the life science and pharma industry.

The DEEP project offers a unified data platform with important information about digital health tools and ways to measure patient assessment data.

“I’ve always felt very passionate about collaborating together to advance things we care about,” Langel said. The time is right for a project like DEEP. “There’s a lot of venture capital in digital health right now. It’s starting to bloom and grow,” he said. “This will allow us to discover how patients function.”

The project ties into cutting-edge trends, such as personalized medicine and patient-centric drug development, he added.

With more clinical trial assessments being done remotely since the pandemic, Langel said, scientists need this catalog of different digital health tools. DEEP combines searchable information on different measuring devices with evidence-based studies on their efficacy and links to specific algorithms and data that show how well the devices work.

“This is very useful to connect researchers with different aspects of health, so they can measure all of these different variables,” Langel said. “It’s quite a rich catalog and we’re proud of what we offer here. I think this will be a fantastic tool.”

During his talk, Langel outlined a specific example of how the DEEP resource, which is currently used internally at Janssen, can be used for a scientist who is trying to gather precise data for Parkinson’s disease.

In the past, Parkinson’s patients were difficult to measure because they have a great deal of tremors. They also have memory and cognitive issues, so they were not the most reliable partners. By searching for Parkinson’s tools in the DEEP catalog, researchers could discover a new way to measure movement using electromyography (EMG), which measures electrical signals in muscles.

By tapping into this new, unified resource, scientists will be able to participate in the patient-centricity trend and create a new way to benefit this patient population. The EMG tool will help physicians better understand the relationship between patient tremors and the timing of their medication doses. By doing so, they can change the morning dose, for example, to minimize tremors later in the day.

“These measurements bring a ton of value,” Langel said.

Looking to the future, he feels DEEP provides the perfect opportunity to bring Pistoia members around the table to collaborate and innovate by using coordinated data sets and sharing best practices and information. “There is a lot of synergy and sharing,” he said. “We want to make a real impact with real value. It’s time to come together and move forward.”

Speaker

• Kai Langel, Senior Director, Strategy & Innovation, Janssen

2022 European Conference Sponsors

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