Novartis and Kaiku Health’s (Kaiku) partnership to develop digital patient monitoring and management for patients with melanoma is being expanded to provide improved cancer care to more patients across multiple indications, following the reported success of the year-old collaboration.
In the first phase of the original partnership, which was announced in April 2021, the two companies developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib) combination targeted therapies for adjuvant, unresectable or metastatic melanoma with BRAF mutation.
The aim of the collaboration was to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting, as well as to develop more advanced machine learning based algorithms, such as symptom prediction, in order to personalise the symptom management of patients receiving Tafinlar and Mekinist, and other BRAF and MEK combination therapies.
Henri Virtanen, deputy general manager and co-founder of Kaiku Health, described how the cooperation so far has led to the enhanced monitoring and symptom management of melanoma patients specifically, and that the digital therapeutics company is “committed and excited to continue this work together, as well as to scale [their] joint efforts across new cancer types and treatments globally”.
Describing the ambitions for the partnership extension, Virtanen said: “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.”
Kaiku has also been working with Roche since 2019, with the companies extending the digital monitoring and management partnership (DPMM) in May this year to further develop the DPMM tools, in order to provide real-time symptom management, as well as improved patient support.
The partnership with Roche also seeks to provide further clinical evidence on the impact of digital patient monitoring on clinical outcomes through evidence generation studies.
“Digital solutions are becoming increasingly important for delivering quality care to patients,” said James Sabry, global head of pharma partnering at Roche. “This partnership is a significant step towards delivering digital patient monitoring and management solutions that may help improve outcomes such as symptom burden and quality of life for individuals receiving systemic therapy for cancer.”