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Harry's guest this week is Jeff Elton, CEO of a Boston-based startup called Concert AI that's working to bring more "real-world data" and "real-world evidence" into the process of drug development. What's real-world data? It's everything about patients' health that's not included in the narrow outcomes measured by randomized, controlled clinical trials. By collecting, organizing, and analyzing it, Elton argues, pharmaceutical makers can it design better clinical trials, get drugs approved faster, and—after approval—learn who's really benefiting from a new medicine, and how. 

Concert AI, which has offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Memphis, New York, and Bangalore, specializes in providing “research-grade real-world data” and AI-based analytical services to companies developing cancer drugs. Before joining Concert AI, Elton was managing director of strategy and global lead of predictive health intelligence at Accenture, and before that he was a senior vice president of strategy and global chief operating officer at the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research. He’s the co-author with Anne O’Riordan of a 2016 book from Wiley called Healthcare Disrupted: Next Generation Business Models and Strategies.

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Full Transcript

Harry Glorikian: I’m Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.

Harry Glorikian: In the world of drug development, there’s a tendency to think that the only data that matter are the data that get collected from patients during randomized controlled clinical trials. That’s the type of study that drug companies use as the gold standard to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs and that the FDA uses to make drug approval decisions. But it’s just not true. 

Way before clinical trials begin, there’s a ton of genomic or proteomic or chemical data that can go into identifying new drug candidates, as we’ve learned from many of our previous guests on the show. 

And today my old friend Jeff Elton is here to tell us about another important kind of data that get collected before, during, and even after clinical trials that can have a huge impact on how drugs are used.

It’s called real-world data, and it basically mea