Just over a year after Roche and GE joined forces to develop clinical decision tools to help guide treatment, the duo have announced their first product.
The result is a clinical ‘dashboard’ – called NAVIFY Tumour Board 2.0 – which brings together data from diagnostic tests and medical imaging into one place, and according to the companies, will give multidisciplinary cancer care teams “a more comprehensive view of each patient in one place.”
For the first time, radiologists will be able to upload their patient records to the same dashboard where patient files from other disciplines in the cancer care team are stored, says Roche. For now, the dashboard is only available in the US and Canada.
Roche and GE first started working on the project in January 2018, drawing on Roche’s biomarker, tissue pathology, genomics and sequencing platforms – which were used in the first iteration of the software – and adding in GE’s medical imaging and monitoring equipment technologies.
By tying the two sets of data together with analytic software and linking it to patient records, the partners reckon that the dashboards will help clinicians to make faster, more accurate and – importantly – more individualised decisions.
“Workflows around tumour boards can be inefficient,” commented Tom McGuinness, chief executive of GE Healthcare Imaging.
“We hope this single, holistic dashboard – including patient data and images – will enable oncology teams to align more quickly on the most optimal diagnosis and treatment plan for the benefit of each patient.”
With the cancer care dashboard now ready, Roche and GE are focusing on a second platform in critical care, in which data from a patient’s hospital monitoring equipment will be integrated with other information such as biomarker, genomic and sequencing data.
Roche and GE say that doing so could help doctors identify, or even predict severe complications in critical care before they strike. Meanwhile, the companies intimate they are starting to look beyond these two areas into new therapeutic categories.
There seems little doubt that Roche and GE’s respectively strong positions in medical diagnostics and imaging makes the collaboration particularly potent as the two try to help introduced a connected digital healthcare system, in the face of stubborn persistence of data silos. Whether they are successful – and in turn that leads to better healthcare – remains to be seen of course.
Roche says that the launch of NAVIFY Tumour Board is an “important step in [its] personalised healthcare strategy to fit treatments to patients who can benefit most from a specific therapy.”
New liquid biopsy player
Staying in the diagnostics field, this week also saw the emergence from stealth mode of Thrive Earlier Detection, a company that has been set up to develop cancer diagnostics based on simple blood tests – known as liquid biopsies.
Thrive has just raised $110m in a Series A financing that will help it develop CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test developed at Johns Hopkins University in the US and currently being validated in a 10,000-subject trial. The test looks for a pattern of DNA alterations and blood proteins to identify multiple cancer types.