Following a successful collaboration, the companies will now partner to focus on precision medicine
Last year cancer care specialists, Kaiku Health, announced its collaboration with Novartis, with a view to developing digital patient monitoring and management for melanoma patients. Following the success of this collaboration, the companies are now expanding it into a wider partnership.
In the first phase of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib) – targeted therapies for adjuvant, unresectable or metastatic melanoma with BRAF mutation.
The goal was to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting and to develop more advanced machine learning based algorithms, such as symptom prediction, for personalising the management of patients receiving Tafinlar and Mekinist and other combination therapies.
The project started with cancer clinics in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy using the Tafinlar and Mekinist specific module alongside Kaiku’s BRAF/MEK Module.
“Our goal is to make precision medicine available for a growing number of cancer patients. The cooperation so far has shown that together we can enhance the monitoring and symptom management of melanoma patients specifically. We are committed and excited to continue this work together, as well as to scale our joint efforts across new cancer types and treatments globally,” explained Henri Virtanen, deputy general manager at Kaiku Health.
“The next phase of our partnership includes taking machine learning algorithms further. Machine learning based symptom prediction is one great way to bring precision medicine to more and more patients and we are excited to keep working on it together, enhancing the now existing ML-model in melanoma, but also starting to work on ML-models in other indications and treatments,” he added.
The cooperation has already begun its long-term expansion with additional cancer clinics starting to use the melanoma Tafinlar and Mekinist-specific module.
