Ivy Weng, Group VP, of Life Sciences at Komodo Health Shares Insights on its Collaboration with Intercept Pharmaceuticals

Shots:

Ivy shared details of its collaboration with Intercept Pharmaceuticals and how Intercept is using Komodo’s tech platform and healthcare map for a retrospective real-world study on the long-term outcomes for Ocaliva
She also talked about how pharma companies can utilize Komodo’s technology platform and how it supports rare disease research
The interview gives an understanding of how Komodo Health is creating a new standard for real-world data and developing AI-based software solutions to close gaps in care and reduce disease burden

Smriti: Can you share more details about your collaboration with Intercept Pharma?

Ivy Weng: Intercept has leveraged Komodo’s technology to fuel a retrospective study on long term outcomes for Ocaliva, a leading therapeutic to treat primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), a rare liver disease. Following feasibility challenges identifying and recruiting patients from such a small patent population, Intercept terminated its COBALT study and turned to real-world data sources.

By linking de-identified data from Komodo’s Healthcare Map with other key data sources using our platform, Intercept researchers were able to compare clinical outcomes in a pre-defined group of patients with PBC who were treated with Ocaliva to outcomes for a comparable group of PBC patients who were eligible, but who were not treated with Ocaliva.

This real-world analysis ultimately demonstrated statistically significant improvement in event-free survival for PBC patients receiving Ocaliva.

Smriti: Can we talk about the FDA guidance related to retrospective RWE analysis and how it impacts Komodo health?

Ivy Weng: Over the past year, the FDA has been issuing updated guidance about the role of real-world evidence in regulatory decision-making, creating more structure around the definitions and applications of RWE.

These updates are exciting because they signal that the industry is recognizing the massive evolution that’s taken place in terms of quality and application of real-world data and the massive potential of this type of evidence in driving innovation and ensuring the patient is at the center of every decision.

We believe Komodo is uniquely positioned to support Life Sciences and other healthcare entities pursuing real-world research and drive regulatory-grade insights that can fuel clinical decision making. We see this in action with our Life Sciences customers like Intercept, Janssen, and Karyopharm, but also with the academic institutions we support including Stanford University’s Center for Population Health Sciences and the University of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy.

In the case of rare diseases like PBC, Komodo’s technology and data-driven insights are helping to produce high-fidelity study outcomes in traditionally challenging therapeutic areas. We see real-world evidence as an important piece of healthcare research’s future and believe that the FDA’s evolving guidance should serve as a symbol of hope for all patients with rare, historically under-researched conditions.

Smriti: Can you talk about Komodo’s tech platform & Healthcare Map and how it is useful for pharma companies?

Ivy Weng: Now more than ever, healthcare stakeholders need a reliable “ground truth” understanding of how patients are interacting with the healthcare system, to understand the reality of patient experiences and address the burden of disease. With that at our core, we’ve developed a technology platform that can be used by customers across the healthcare spectrum to access insights from longitudinal patient-level data and act on those insights to address a wide range of healthcare challenges and use cases.

We have customers using our platform across the entire life sciences lifecycle, from identifying trends in disease burden to enabling Medical Affairs teams to close gaps in care to understanding the seemingly disconnected signals that could indicate a rare disease patient who could be a candidate for a therapy or a clinical trial.

Smriti: How else can Komodo’s technology support rare disease research?

Ivy Weng: In so many health data use cases, ICD codes are foundational as the shared language for categorizing and tracking diseases and care. These codes also provide insight into disease patterns, care journeys, gaps in outcomes, and more. These insights can power meaningful strategic decision-making throughout the drug lifecycle – such as targeting HCP education or designing clinical trial criteria. However, within rare diseases, most conditions do not have a designated ICD-10 diagnosis code and single codes are sometimes used for several different rare conditions – making it difficult to gather information about a disease, patient experiences, symptom patterns, effective treatments, and outcomes.

Using Komodo’s Healthcare Map, we can actually find those “hidden” patients and then layer in tooling from our platform to build algorithms that can shine a light on a constellation of diagnosis codes, causative factors, treatment journeys, and other standout determinants.

Having a clearer picture of the healthcare experiences for the specific cohort of patients you’re researching – such as the location of HCPs, whether they are being treated by any specialists, patterns of ER visits, common comorbidities, demographics, common misdiagnoses — unlocks a host of opportunities to better serve this patient population. This could range from identifying candidates for earlier disease screening, to educating HCPs who are most likely to treat them on red-flag symptoms, to being able to better estimate patient eligibility for a new clinical trial.

Smriti: What are the applications beyond liver disease for Komodo’s tech platform and Healthcare Map?

Ivy Weng: We have customers across life sciences who utilize Komodo’s technology for a wide range of strategic decisions. For example, in the earliest stages of drug development, we have drug discovery teams using our real-world evidence and powerful analytics to help generate hypotheses that will guide the clinical study process. Within clinical development, operations leaders are using our patient-level insights to pinpoint the HCPs and HCOs that are most likely to see patient populations of interest and, in turn, plan trial sites and protocols to best reach those patients. Across Medical Affairs and Commercial teams, highly accurate longitudinal patient journey data can help identify previously unseen symptom patterns, inform provider education strategies, and develop patient-centric approaches to provide the highest standard of care to the right patients at the right time.

With Komodo’s platform, any healthcare stakeholder – regardless of technical expertise – is able to easily access and act on longitudinal patient-level data to address a wide range of healthcare challenges at scale and bring new health solutions into the market faster. Whether that’s performing high-fidelity research or building net new applications directly on our Healthcare Map, users can transform extraordinary amounts of data into rich and meaningful insights that can be deployed into the market helping the industry identify and address crucial challenges in the healthcare industry.

Smriti: How is Komodo continuing to advance its offerings to drive more benefits for Life Sciences?

Ivy Weng: We recently introduced MapEnhance, a network of specialty data partners that seamlessly connects new datasets — including genomic, lab, cost and clinical insights — to Komodo's Healthcare Map, to drive faster and timelier insights across healthcare and Life Sciences.

With MapEnhance, Komodo customers can choose from a range of different types of health insights from specialized, proprietary data partners such as PointClickCare, Trio Health, Invitae, and more. Users can then quickly perform more comprehensive analytics, develop higher-performing predictive models, and conduct healthcare research on a unique combination of data products – fueling an entirely new dimension of insight into the individual patient journey.

Image Source: Canva

About the Author: 

Ivy Weng is the Group VP at Komodo Health overseeing Real World Evidence and Partnerships across life sciences. Ivy focuses on building best-in-class software solutions for HEOR/RWE teams. Prior to Komodo Health, she worked on value-based payments at Blue Cross Blue Shield. Ivy graduated with an MD from Taipei Medical University and an MS in Analytics from the University of Rochester Simon Business School.