Toward Data-Driven R&D -Considering the Utilization of Health and Medical Data
Yasuhiko Nakatsuka (Senior Researcher, Pharmaceuticals and Industrial Policy Research Institute)
(No. 80: Published in March 2022)
With the spread of the new coronavirus, digitalization in Japanese society is accelerating. As digitalization accelerates and society as a whole becomes more data-driven, we believe that the pharmaceutical industry needs to adapt to the "data-driven society" as well.
Until now, the data utilized by the pharmaceutical industry has been "patient data," especially in clinical development, where prospective clinical trials were conducted to generate "data" such as primary endpoints. However, it is clear that in the future, it will not only be "patient data" that will play the leading role, but also "digitized patient and consumer data" that will be collected by appropriate (health) data platforms. Accumulation of "life course health data" as data of an individual's entire life will be important in future data-driven research and development.
This paper introduces data acquired by IoT devices (wearable devices), which are expected to accelerate the collection of "life course health data" in the future, and proposes new legislation to enable the pharmaceutical industry to make better use of such data.