Sanofi U.S. has announced collaborations with the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and, separately, with the Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH) at Massachusetts General Hospital. The collaborations are designed to create new tools that will help predict how people living with type 2 diabetes adhere to their medication.  

The goal of the collaborations is to improve patient health outcomes, drug development, clinical trial design and quality of care. CATCH and the DCRI are utilizing novel machine learning methods to extract meaningful patient insights. These insights are being captured by large scale use of anonymized individual patient level data and adhere to Sanofi's strict privacy standards. Using these insights, healthcare providers may ensure better outcomes by tailoring their treatment strategies to each patient based on demonstrated similar behaviors.

"CATCH's focus on integrative analytics and phenotypes will allow patients and healthcare professionals to make better informed and more tailored, effective decisions," said Dennis Ausiello, M.D., CATCH's co-founder and director. "Collaborations like this will help ensure our work is brought to the discovery and development process far sooner than was ever before possible."

The collaborations are exploring more accurate models that capture non-traditional data measures including prescription fill, socio-geographic and behavioral. For example, if a geographical community exhibits characteristics that are shown to have a correlation with lower medication adherence, then these characteristics could be used to more effectively tailor approaches to patient engagement. Patient outreach in those communities could be adapted accordingly and intensified. The goal is to better anticipate patient-specific drug adherence, improve prediction of clinical outcomes and guide future clinical trial designs.

"The results of this very innovative approach to using all available data, including non-traditional healthcare data, will help to directthe deployment of ever more personalized engagement programs, practical tools and services to enable people living with diabetes to engage more proactively with their treatment and thus achieve more satisfying outcomes," said Peter Juhn, M.D., MPH, vice president, Sanofi Global Diabetes Integrated Care.