Syapse®, a real-world data company accelerating the delivery of precision medicine through the Syapse Learning Health NetworkTM, and the U.S. FDA Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) have expanded an existing multi-year Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA) focused on the use of real-world data (RWD) to support clinical and regulatory decision-making.
“We’re learning quickly how sophisticated analyses of real-world data can provide rapid insights into COVID-19. The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence is working to understand COVID-19 in cancer patients using real world data, both through the COVID-19 Evidence Accelerator and a Research Collaboration Agreement with Syapse,” said FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD. “One of our goals is to reduce the burden of lengthy clinical trials on cancer patients and clinical researchers, and we are optimistic that the use of real-world data will help us address important questions more rapidly today, and increasingly so in the future.”
Based on their collaboration efforts, Syapse and the FDA have highlighted results from rapid analyses of real-world data involving cancer patients with COVID-19. Recently, the FDA’s OCE and Syapse presented data at a virtual medical meeting of an analysis of more than 200,000 health records of people living with cancer across two major health systems. Data suggest that patients with cancer who also had COVID-19, compared to those who did not have COVID-19, are more likely to have other health conditions such as kidney failure, obesity and heart disease, in addition to increased rates of hospitalization and invasive mechanical ventilation, along with 16 times greater risk of death. Syapse and its Learning Health Network collaborators presented these findings at the AACR Virtual Meeting on COVID-19 and Cancer on July 22, 2020. The full presentation can be found on the Syapse website.
Thomas Brown, MD, Syapse’s chief medical officer, stated, “Understanding how a patient’s medical history influences their treatment outcomes in a real-world setting is critical for clinicians, researchers and regulatory agencies to appropriately weigh the risk-benefit profile of a drug for a given patient.”
Through a multi-year collaboration, Syapse is partnering with FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence to:
Investigate methods to derive RWD from multiple sources including electronic health records, registries and molecular data;
Enhance understanding of how patients respond to therapies outside of clinical trials to improve care and outcomes; and
Understand the impact of COVID-19 on cancer care.
About the Syapse Learning Health Network™
This global network of healthcare providers shares real-world data to support clinical decisions and foster collaborations among participants. Healthcare providers, including doctors and nurses, share and learn which cancer treatments produced better real-world outcomes in clinically and molecularly similar patients. Researchers learn from real-world clinical, molecular, treatment and outcomes data. These collaborations are enabled by a secure platform of shared de-identified data that is standardized and normalized across the Learning Health Network and complies with all applicable federal and state data privacy protection regulations.
About Syapse
Syapse works with leading health systems, life sciences companies, and regulators to explore opportunities to use real-world evidence to improve the outcomes of cancer patients. By bringing these organizations together into the Syapse Learning Health NetworkTM, Syapse has built one of the world’s largest networks with a goal to improve outcomes in cancer care through improved precision medicine. Syapse and its partners are working towards a future in which all cancer patients have access to the quality of care they need.
