Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by informationweek.com and can be viewed in full here

Researchers are poised to make huge advances in medicine, particularly in how we treat cancer and arthritis. See how big data and IT are contributing.

Drugs can be expensive, difficult to research, hard to get approved, and, according to a recent report, don’t work on large parts of the population. These factors likely put a great deal of pressure on pharmaceutical companies to research drugs that have the highest probability of turning a profit rather than those that could help the most people.

But this paradigm may be shifting with the help of IT and big data.The industry has found new ways IT and big data are making a major impact on the way drugs are being researched by helping create more effective trials.

As drug companies try to address those criticisms and create more accurate drug trials, the cost and time of developing drugs can increase due to delays in creating patient pools, difficulty finding pools with the right genetic makeup, and the need to increase the length of trials to find drugs that will work for greater portions of the population.

Changing the way we design and administer treatment trials, using big data to bring “personalized” or “precision” medicine to drug trials and research, can potentially reduce costs, allow the right drugs to be prescribed faster, and improve outcomes at lower costs. It also may mean faster drug development with easier margins. It is one of those rare win-wins for pharmaceutical companies and patients.

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