Kaiku Health, the developer of digital health intervention platform in oncology, announced it will develop digital patient monitoring and management for melanoma patients in collaboration with Novartis, a leading global medicines company.
Melanoma is less common than other types of skin cancer, but it can more easily spread to other parts of the body. Approximately half of the patients have BRAF V600-positive melanoma and may be eligible for BRAF and MEK inhibitor combination therapy for their cancer. The combination treatment is an oral targeted therapy that patients typically take outside the cancer centers. A research published at ESMO Virtual Congress in 2020 [1] indicated that over 90% of centers that have utilized telemedicine with patients receiving oral targeted therapies during the COVID-19 pandemic are also intending to do so in the future.
Kaiku Health and Novartis are now aiming to further improve the remote monitoring and support of these patients with the joint development of a therapy-specific module for patients receiving BRAF/MEK combination therapies for melanoma. The developed module is designed to track symptoms and to provide personalized symptom self-management guidance and patient education. Kaiku Health platform will also automatically notify the care team, if patients’ symptoms get worse during the treatment course. Patients can use Kaiku Health either as the mobile application, designed for their smartphones and tablets, or the web browser-based application on their computers.
The intent of the collaboration is also to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting and the goal is to develop more advanced Machine Learning based algorithms for personalizing the symptom management of patients receiving BRAF and MEK combination therapies.
“We are excited to collaborate with Novartis to develop together more personalized symptom management and patient support for melanoma patients. The introduction of several oral targeted therapies has resulted in growing need for improved ways for monitoring patients remotely during their treatments, and we are excited to work closely with Novartis and several leading cancer centers in further improving the digital patient monitoring and management of melanoma patients”, says Lauri Sippola, the CEO of Kaiku Health.
In the initial phase of the collaboration, the goal is to pilot the co-created module in cancer centers located in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy starting in May 2021.
