Every second counts in the race to launch transformative new drugs and the innovative use of data can help save pharmaceutical companies time and money. Clinical trial registries are particularly valuable data sources, revealing a wealth of information about global drug trials.
This data is gold dust for pharma companies, who can leverage it for multiple use cases: to spot new development opportunities, keep abreast of the competition, optimise trial designs, develop launch and pricing strategies, and more.
With 744,100 clinical trials registered worldwide between 1999 and 2022, according to the World Health Organisation, manual data processing is time-consuming and ineffective. Automated data extraction is the key to unlocking the registries’ valuable insights.
AI-driven data extraction and enrichment
Cognizant has a suite of powerful AI-driven tools and robotics to mine vast quantities of clinical trial data for our pharmaceutical industry clients: rapidly and as frequently as required. From a Cognizant IP address, our robotics scan – and extract data from – the open-source web pages of around 300 global trials registries worldwide. We can run multiple scans a day, detecting new and changed content each time.
Our automated solutions then enrich the data by translating all information if necessary and organising it into the appropriate structured format to give our clients instant visibility.
Here’s how our advanced extraction techniques are supporting one client, Access Infinity.
Unlocking drug trials data: a specific brief
As a specialist digital and consulting solutions provider for the pharma industry, Access Infinity supports companies to develop and design market access and pricing strategies for their pipeline assets.
Access Infinity needed additional information on clinical drugs trials to feed into NURO, its industry-leading business intelligence platform. This is a one-stop solution for comprehensive insights across regulatory, clinical evidence, pricing and market access. These insights enable pharma companies to benchmark new drugs against analogues – marketed drugs which have similar product and/or disease landscape attributes.
Access Infinity engaged Cognizant to extract content from clinical trials registries against 26 designated datapoints, such as objectives, trial phase, trial design, status , sites and results, where available. This information enhances the NURO platform offering and equips Access Infinity’s clients with the most up-to-date evidence against therapy areas, supporting them to make faster, smarter market access and pricing decisions.
The brief is specific, and searches are conducted within a tightly defined scope, encompassing:
- Trials from the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, China, South Korea, Japan and Brazil only
- Three trials registries: ClinicalTrials.gov (based in the US but including trials worldwide), South Korea’s Clinical Research Information Service and the Chinese Clinical Trials Registry
- A focus on Phase II and III studies
Trials with a start date of January 2015 onwards and a completion date of January 2017 onwards.
Up-to-date clinical evidence: empowering Access Infinity’s clients
Cognizant began with a full extraction of all relevant trials' information against the datapoints to feed into NURO. From this baseline, we continue to scan and extract data from the three registries fortnightly, as agreed with Access Infinity, providing updates about new trials, developments within trials and completions.
Our classification tools also translate content, summarise it and format it to Access Infinity’s requirements, submitting a combined file to upload to NURO.
Nuro transforms the way pharma companies make decisions by providing data-driven insights on everything from pricing to clinical trials to HTA - all in one place. Users of NURO benefit from not just the retrospective insights on other drugs that have launched but also prospective view of the pipeline and future launches.
"Cognizant provides Access Infinity with crucial clinical trials' data quickly and cost-effectively. When combined with NURO’s insights on pricing and health technology assessments, this information enables pharmaceutical companies' market access and pricing teams to assess and evaluate the approval and pricing/ access potential of their pipeline assets.” – Keshav Nagaraja, Managing Director, Digital, Access Infinity.
Cognizant’s advanced, bespoke data extraction service
Our value-for-money data extraction service, driven by automation and robotics, offers unrivalled access to global clinical trials data. Our partnership with Access Infinity has a highly specific scope, but we can scan and mine much wider datasets from all open-source trial registries worldwide.
Cognizant’s principal propriety tool for this service is CSeR, a Java-based solution which performs content extraction from open web sources. This runs alongside a suite of other AI-driven solutions to:
- Extract data from dynamic HTML pages and from sources including images and PDFs, printed and handwritten
- Access historical data from completed trials and deliver on-demand updates of existing trials.
- Detect and highlight changes to clinical trials content, frequently as required.
- Auto-scope to specified data points.
- Summarise the raw input data and translate it into English if necessary.
To find out more, get in touch.
