What information does Roche acquire from the medical big data unicorn?
When the Chinese celebrated the 2018 Lunar New Year, international pharmaceutical giant Roche announced that it would acquire all the remaining shares of American cancer data company Flatiron Health for US$1.9 billion, thus making this sturdy medical big data unicorn strong. In the pocket.
Why does Roche gamble on this unicorn? What does this acquisition reveal important information about the global healthcare industry? What are the important inspirations from the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and digital medical practitioners to promote the transformation and development of the industry?
What information does the Roche acquisition reveal?
Roche already owns 12.6% of its equity before deciding to acquire all of the remaining shares of Flatiron Health. Why spend a lot of money to carry out "control" to the end?
Roche CEO Daniel O'Day explains: “This acquisition is an important step in our company's future-oriented personalized healthcare strategy. Normative real-world data sources and modeling capabilities are critical to accelerating the development of cancer treatment technologies and new drugs. Flatiron Health is a leading oncology big data technology services company that provides us with the underlying technology and data modeling services for future pharmaceutical R&D."
The “normative†here refers to real-world data sources and corresponding processing technologies that are recognized by the FDA (United States Drug Administration). Flatiron has been working with the FDA to assist the FDA in the revision and upgrading of industrial policies such as clinical trials through real-world data models, making the new drug development and marketing process in the field of cancer more in line with market demand.
Flatiron's core processing technology is critical to Roche. Forbes contributor David Shaywitz believes that the acquisition will at least give Roche four benefits: easy access to traceable real-world data sources that work with a large number of healthcare organizations, significant clinical research costs, and rapid access to the database Data and improve decision-making efficiency and shorten the time-to-market for Roche drugs. Flatrion's innovative model has greatly reduced the development cycle and cost of pharmaceutical companies, and has improved the efficiency of clinical research institutions and achieved a win-win situation in the medical industry.
Serving the pharmaceutical industry through traceable big data processing technology, it also has great market value in China. In 2017, a series of announcements by the State Council and CFDA and government work reports issued by the two previous conferences explicitly mentioned that to speed up the listing of drugs and the whole process of supervision of listed drugs, one of the 2018 national key medical tasks is to adopt the listing and supervision of innovative food and drug products. Ways, focusing on the use of the Internet, big data, etc. to enhance the effectiveness of new drug approval and listing supervision, and accelerate the realization of traces throughout the process, information traceability.
These statements clarify the value of traceable big data processing techniques. Liu Junshuai, deputy chairman of the Policy Committee of the China Pharmaceutical Innovation Promotion Association, said that big data analysis can help decision-making institutions determine clinically necessary and effective innovative drugs and patented drugs, reduce the listing of some “Shenzhen medicines†and reduce the level of medical insurance reimbursement. Drug adjustment decisions provide support.
China's medical big data companies are expected to overtake
According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), there are currently about 13 million cancer patients in the United States. According to a survey of medical incubators and seed fund Rock Health, there are currently more than 200 cancer centers and 1,700 clinicians in the United States using Flatiron Health's cloud data platform, which has about 4 million cancer patient information through Flatiron Health.
From the data of patients and service organizations processed by Flatiron, it has improved the efficiency of clinical research institutions, reduced the development cycle and cost of pharmaceutical companies, and made the new drug research and development process in the field of tumors more in line with market demand. The great value of data processing technology.
In China, the demand for medical big data from medical institutions such as the top three hospitals is also huge. For example, as a leader in the field of domestic cancer medical treatment, Peking University Cancer Hospital has more than 40,000 inpatients in 2013, and the annual outpatient volume exceeded 450,000. The demand for big data processing technology in clinical research and hospital management. Extremely urgent.
Peking University Cancer Hospital has said that the HIS system and the electronic medical record system are just the needs of hospital informationization, which belongs to the production system. It is also the content that the hospital has been continuously investing and focusing on for many years. At the same time, the data in the hospital electronic information system still exists. The definition is unclear, missing data, logical errors, non-retrospective and many other issues, the data can not be used directly. The big data technologies they need have been researched and compared, and they are more focused on the full amount of data, traceability, and refinement. Based on such target needs, Peking University Cancer Hospital finally chose a company called Medical Duyun.
In fact, Chinese companies like Zhiduyun have exceeded Flatiron Health's processing power and processing depth for traceable big data. From a technical perspective, Flatiron Health uses a data extraction tool based on natural language processing to mine data, and hires and trains a large number of medical professionals to carefully read these unstructured fields and extract relevant data. This approach gives Flatiron access to higher quality data than similar companies in the United States.
But in China, this advantage of Flatiron is also challenged. Unlike Flatiron's large-scale use of labor, China's medical big data companies, with the example of Zhiduyun, have established deep-cycle cooperation with nearly 100 top-level top three hospitals in China, and established a full-cycle disease portrait with the government and external data sources. A large number of high-quality medical knowledge maps, through the deep learning technology of knowledge embedding, in the structure of semi-structured and unstructured medical text data, a series of independently developed algorithms and patented technologies, their big data application platform (DPAP) ) AI technology can be used to clean data, high-quality structured processing and other operations, greatly reducing labor and time costs in the data production process. Moreover, unlike Flatiron, which is concentrated only in the single field of tumors, Medical Duyun is doing the whole disease level. That is, through the data platform for the hospital departments, the data of each department in the hospital is opened, and each core disease special disease database is established. It is reported that Medical Duyun has invested more than 1 billion yuan in technology research and development.
As the world enters the era of big data, the value of big data technology is increasingly recognized, and the rich and large data source is an important prerequisite for the development of big data industry. From millions of real data to hundreds of millions of levels or more, it is difficult to do it by humans. The data access method must be electronic and batch-based. At present, the information records of some of the top three hospitals in China have been electronically realized, which can also ensure the authenticity and traceability of data from the data source.
Judging from this trend and perspective, China's medical big data related enterprises that deal with real-world data of the whole life cycle, because of the larger amount of data and higher accuracy, their models are also favored by the medical and medical circles. The potential market prospects are more worth looking forward to, and there is more hope for a corner overtaking.
China's medical big data industry will enter an outbreak
China's medical big data companies are catching up with the new era of the new era. Coupled with the intensive release of medical big data policies in the past two years, the medical big data market is welcoming an unprecedented development opportunity.
Recently, there have been frequent acquisitions and investment and financing events in the field of medical big data at home and abroad. Industry experts have begun to realize that the regulatory-level medical big data of traceable production will be the basis for future drug development and discourse rights, and the development of the entire pharmaceutical industry. Foundation. In the next few years, mergers and acquisitions in the industry will be more frequent and intense. Who will become or surpass Flatiron based on China's large data volume and sufficient sample size, it is undoubtedly worthy of attention, but perhaps more importantly: Who can continue healthy and sustainable?
The medical practitioners are willing to do their best. Providing more accurate and efficient treatment programs for the people has always been the unremitting pursuit of the Chinese medical and health industry. In this new era of medical and health industry development, research hospitals will pay more and more attention to the value of data. The diagnosis and treatment plan based on the patient's life cycle data will be more accurate and efficient, and expect more quality medical big data in China. The company is able to move forward and work together to promote the development of China's medical industry . (Consumer Daily)
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