Novartis goes digital with ‘Trials of the Future’

Novartis will launch a new initiative, ‘Trials of the Future’, to digitally connect and aggregate medical device data during clinical trials.

Teaming up with Qualcomm Life, a division of Qualcomm, the pharma group says it aims to “leverage health care technology to improve the experience of clinical trial participants and patients using Novartis products, and provide connectivity with future products marketed by Novartis”.

Novartis will make use of Qualcomm’s 2net Platform, 2net Hub and 2net Mobile technologies with designated medical devices to automate the collection of vital patient data at patient's homes during clinical trials. 

“Novartis is a pioneer in putting technology to use in advancing pharmaceutical innovation,” said Rick Valencia, senior vice president and general manager, Qualcomm Life. “Standardising on the tech-agnostic 2net Platform and accessing the robust ecosystem of integrated medical devices will provide them a great range of flexibility and scalability, ultimately accelerating their efforts to design more efficient, cost-effective clinical trials.”

Novartis is using the 2net Platform in a recently-launched clinical study, evaluating the use of mobile devices with chronic lung disease patients. The study, which is observational in nature and does not involve any Novartis pharmaceutical product, uses 2net Mobile-enabled smartphones and 2net Hubs to collect and aggregate biometric data from medical devices and transmits this data to the cloud-based 2net Platform, which securely sends the data to the study coordinator. 

Qualcomm is exhibiting at CES in Las Vegas this week.