Roche further expands in digital medicine

Roche and GE announced they will develop a co-branded software solution for clinical decision support of doctors in oncology and intensive care units. The companies will combine their complentary know-how to enable earlier diagnoses and individualised treatment. In a press release, they announced to apply advanced analytics to patient data acquired with GE’s medical imaging and monitoring equipment and in-vitro data from Roche’s biomarker, tissue pathology, genomics and sequencing portfolio. The companies said this will be „an industry-first digital platform, which will allow the seamless integration and analysis of in-vivo and in-vitro data, patient records, medical best practice, real time monitoring and the latest research outcomes.The strategic alliance with GE complements Roche’s marketing activities for Navify, its tumour board decision support system that was launched in October 2017. At the end of 2017, the first European laboratory of Roche’s US arm Foundation Medicine Inc (FMI) opened. FMI is a specialist for gene panel sequencing of tumour genes and compares the individual tumour mutation profiles obtained from biopsy material with its proprietary database that contains more than 400,000 records of US cancer patients to find the best treatment and diagnosis.

Integration of clinical, imaging and data on the mutational status of tumours is the holy grail in digitalised medicine, commercial stakeholder suggest since some time, as it holds the promise to ease healthtech assessment and pricing based on real-world data as well as recruitment of appropriate patient collectives for clinical trials. Patients might benefit from the calculations of such correlation analyses as they aim to calculate the drug with the highest probability to show an effect in patients from a patients data. Oncologists and pathologists, however, have questioned the concept to keep data behind companies firewalls that have been build on data acquired through diagnostic sequencing services, which were reimbursed by payors. The demand for open access to that data because it is important for academic researchers to develop new treatment approaches.