How pharma is teaming up with tech to fight infectious diseases

EPM speaks to technology company Lifebit about its collaboration with pharmaceutical organisation Boehringer to report on infectious disease outbreaks.

In June this year pharmaceutical company Boehringer announced a collaboration with Lifebit, a technology company specialising in the collection and analysis of big data within life sciences, with an aim of helping companies discover new drugs and improve patient outcomes.

The partnership will see both companies working together to detect and report on global disease outbreaks. Lifebit is to use its REAL platform, which uses advanced analytic capabilities to automatically notify users of relevant outbreaks, such as transboundary disease spread or the emergence of pathogens, such as Covid-19.

The platform is essentially a way of harvesting data from available real-world evidence. This could be social media posts, news outbreaks and scientific articles such as those on PubMed. The data are then monitored continuously in the hope of assessing where and when the next infectious disease outbreak may occur or is occurring.

“So, for example if a regional newspaper in a far-flung country identifies that there is a new virus spreading throughout their animal or human population, we can pick that info up and the system can synthesise that information into an insight for Boehringer,” Tom Sharrock, AI engagement manager at Lifebit, tells me over a Zoom interview.

The emergence of the partnership during Covid-19 - when pharmaceutical companies have expedited efforts into developing vaccines and therapies against what is essentially a new disease- points to an industry that understands the need for collaboration. 

Despite the fact that pharmaceutical companies developed vaccines for Covid-19 in such a short time compared to normal, the industry was still caught off guard. Certainly, Boehringer understands that in order to effectively develop or reposition drugs against new or emerging pathogens, then a clear data-driven approach is needed.

“I think Boehringer is trying to become more innovative. They realise that in order to move fast in the market they need to adopt a different strategy and that’s what they’re doing. This is an alliance which will allow both companies to deliver great outcomes for patients at the end of the day,” says Dr Maria Chatzou Dunford, CEO and co-founder of Lifebit.

The partnership will offer Boehringer both short-term and long-term opportunities. In the short-term, the real-time data Lifebit provides on how a disease may be spreading and which drugs – if any - are being used to treat it, will enable Boehringer to either accelerate or decelerate its existing efforts. For instance, if there aren’t any drugs being used to fight an emerging disease, then the data could allow Boehringer to look through its own portfolio and assess whether it has any potentially effective therapies to position into the affected regions and territories.

In the longer-term, having clear and accurate data that show what kinds of diseases have become more prevalent will enable Boehringer to potentially invest in those disease areas, or understand how it can maximise its return-on-investment.

Data then is at the heart of this collaboration. Whilst the pharmaceutical industry is built on clinical data that affirm the efficacy of drugs, the partnership between Lifebit and Boehringer is indicative of two industries (pharma & tech) working together to gain a clearer picture of how data can inform a pharmaceutical company’s practices. 

During our conversation, Dr Maria Chatzou Dunford tells me about the laborious nature of data collection when it comes to infectious disease surveillance and how what is offered by the likes of the World Health Organisation (WHO) can be superficial.

Data offered by global agencies, she tells me, doesn’t currently offer a total understanding of a disease. It might say where it’s spreading but it won’t go into why or how it’s affecting animals or humans and what drugs are being used for it.

For a scientist presented with a new disease just knowing where it’s spreading isn’t enough. Where does a researcher start if they don’t have an idea about the chemical structures of a pathogen or any clinical data?

As Dr Maria Chatzou Dunford puts it: “A treasure map is totally useless if you don’t have a big red mark that says dig here. Our system not only gives you the treasure map but also gives you a clear path saying, ‘dig here’.”

In the years to come, this partnership should allow Boehringer to position itself into disease areas where it knows it can be effective.

If there’s any doubt into the use of Lifebit’s technology to identify emerging diseases or infectious disease outbreaks, Sharrock explains to me just how beneficial real-time data such as those on social media can be.

“For a scientist to pick up that there could be a potential outbreak would take a matter of weeks at the minimum. Then to actually publish that data would take a number of extra months. By monitoring social media, you jump ahead to get a better real-time view,” he explains. “There are already cases where we’ve identified particular geographical regions, such as individual parks in a city, where actual disease outbreaks have been pinpointed down to a particular location through social media.”

Of course, a social media post doesn’t have the veracity of something like a scientific article, but Lifebit’s solution is an example of how the life sciences industry can be informed by real-time data found across the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Going forward, Dr Maria Chatzou Dunford believes theirs is a partnership which will be replicated across the pharmaceutical industry.

“I think Boehringer is very smart to realise that there is a new pharma coming and they are embracing that very well. I think other pharma companies will eventually also either perish or adapt,” she says.