April 12, 2016
Charles Moore
Pfizer Inc. and International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM) announced a collaborative research project to
advance the development of remote medical monitoring solutions that aim
to transform how clinicians deliver care to
people with Parkinson’s disease.
The first-of-its-kind experimental approach employed by Pfizer
and IBM will harness a system of sensors, mobile devices, and machine learning
to deliver real-time, around-the-clock patient symptom information to
clinicians and researchers. The collaboration’s ultimate goal is to better
understand a Parkinson’s patient’s disease progression and medication
responses, to help inform treatment decisions and optimize the
design of clinical trials, as well as speed the development of new therapeutic
options.
The research partners note in a release that Parkinson’s disease
(PD) requires especially close monitoring and frequent adjustment of medication
depending on how the disease progresses in individual cases, and on how
each patient responds to treatment. The investigators are seeking to create
holistic assessments of a patient’s well-being through accurate measurement and
correlation of a range of function and symptom indicators, including motor
function, dyskinesia, cognition, sleep, and performance of daily activities
such as grooming, dressing and eating.
Either there are no banners, they are disabled or none qualified
for this location!
Insights derived from these data are expected to assist
clinicians in understanding the effects of medication on disease
progression, enabling optimization and tuning of each patient’s treatment
regimen. Data generated may also provide researchers with insights and
real-world evidence that can help accelerate development of new and potentially
better PD therapies.
According to the World Health Organization, neurological disorders —
which include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, multiple
sclerosis and epilepsy — affect almost
one billion families globally and account for 12 percent of
total annual mortality. Many diseases affecting the brain, spine,
and nervous system are progressive conditions, meaning they worsen over
time with symptom exacerbations such as uncontrolled muscle movement,
impairment of the ability to think clearly, and a debilitating impact on
quality of life.
According to the Parkinsons Disease Foundation, approximately 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with
Parkinson’s disease annually, with an estimated seven to 10 million people
suffering from the disease globally.
“We have an opportunity to potentially redefine how we think
about patient outcomes and 24/7 monitoring, by combining Pfizer’s scientific,
medical and regulatory expertise with IBM’s ability to integrate and interpret
complex data in innovative ways,” says Mikael Dolsten,
MD, PhD, president of Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development, in
the release. “The key to our success will be to deliver a reliable, scalable
system of measurement and analysis that would help inform our clinical programs
across important areas of unmet medical need, potentially accelerating the drug
development and regulatory approval processes and helping us to get better
therapies to patients, faster.”
“With the proliferation of digital health information, one area
that remains elusive is the collection of real-time physiological data to
support disease management,” says Arvind Krishna,
senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “We are testing ways to
create a system that passively collects data with little to no burden on the
patient, and to provide doctors and researchers with objective, real-time
insights that we believe could fundamentally change the way patients are
monitored and treated.”
Pfizer and IBM project that the system they’re developing will
advance to initial clinical testing quickly, and the companies will convene an
external advisory board of patient groups, advocacy organizations, clinicians,
and neuroscientists to advise and guide the use of technology, medical devices,
data management, and research protocols developed through the partnership, and
to ensure that the needs of patients who participate the program are addressed.
IBM says the project marks a significant milestone in its work
to advance Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in healthcare. It notes
that Emory University Hospital in Atlanta,
Georgia, is developing an instrumented ICU using IBM streaming analytics
technology and software, and Excel Medical
Electronics (EME), to advance predictive medicine for
ICU patients through real-time streaming analytics.
Emory is testing a new system that can identify patterns in
physiological data and alert clinicians to danger signs manifesting in patients
in real time. IBM observes that in a typical ICU, a dozen different streams of
medical data may be lighting up an array of monitors at a patient’s bedside —
including heart physiology, respiration, brain waves, and blood pressure — with
this constant feed of vital signs transmitted as waves and numbers, and
routinely displayed on computer screens. Doctors and nurses must rapidly
process and analyze all this information to make medical decisions.
The new system Emory is investigating will enable clinicians to
acquire, analyze, and correlate medical data at a volume and velocity never
before possible — more than 100,000 real-time data points per patient per
second — using IBM’s streaming analytics platform in combination with EME’s
bedside monitor data aggregation application. The software developed by Emory
scientists identifies patterns that could indicate serious complications like
sepsis, heart failure, or pneumonia.
“Accessing and drawing insights from real-time data can mean
life and death for a patient,” says Tim Buchman, MD,
PhD, director of critical care at Emory University Hospital.
“Through this new system we will be able to analyze thousands of streaming data
points and act on those insights to make better decisions about which patient
needs our immediate attention and how to treat that patient. Its making us much
smarter in our approach to critical care.”
Neonatal intensive care specialists at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology
in Toronto are relying on the same software to analyze more than 1,000 pieces
of unique information per second flowing from sensors and equipment monitoring
premature babies, helping caregivers spot the onset of sepsis infections up to
24 hours earlier.
The project will see a group of internationally recognized
researchers, led by Dr. Carolyn
McGregor, a UOIT associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics,
use advanced stream computing software developed by IBM Research with the
objective of greatly enhancing doctors’ decision-making capabilities. The
software processes a constant stream of biomedical data, such as heart rate and
respiration, along with environmental data gathered from advanced sensors and
more traditional monitoring equipment on and around the babies.
The software will also assist the researchers in applying
findings from Dr. McGregor’s body of research to help make “sense” of the data
and, feed resulting analyses in near-real-time to healthcare professionals, so
they can predict potential changes in an infant’s condition with greater
accuracy and intervene more quickly. Physicians in neonatal intensive care
units (NICU) at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and two other
international hospitals are also participating in this study.
Medtronic is also working with
IBM Watson
Health to create a cognitive app designed to analyze real-time data
from Medtronic devices to help detect patterns and trends for people with
diabetes.
You can learn more about IBM Research at:
and about IBM Watson Health at:
For more information about Pfizer visit http://www.pfizer.com
Sources:
Pfizer Inc.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)
World Health Organization
http://parkinsonsnewstoday.com/2016/04/12/ibm-partners-with-pfizer-to-measure-patents-parkinsons-symptoms-in-the-home/
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