Last year Kaiku Health, a leading digital therapeutics platform for cancer care, announced its collaboration with Novartis, a leading global medicines company, in developing digital patient monitoring and management for melanoma patients. Following the success of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis are now expanding it into a partnership.
“Our goal is to make precision medicine available for a growing number of cancer patients. The cooperation so far has shown that together we can enhance the monitoring and symptom management of melanoma patients specifically. We are committed and excited to continue this work together, as well as to scale our joint efforts across new cancer types and treatments globally.” says Henri Virtanen, Deputy General Manager and Co-Founder of Kaiku Health.
In the first phase of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving Tafinlar® (dabrafenib) and Mekinist® (trametinib) combination targeted therapies for adjuvant, unresectable or metastatic melanoma with BRAF mutation. The goal was to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting and to develop more advanced machine learning based algorithms, such as symptom prediction, for personalising the symptom management of patients receiving Tafinlar and Mekinist, and other BRAF and MEK combination therapies.
The project started with cancer clinics in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy using the Tafinlar and Mekinist specific module alongside Kaiku’s BRAF/MEK Module.
“The next phase of our partnership includes taking machine learning algorithms further. Machine learning based symptom prediction is one great way to bring precision medicine to more and more patients and we are excited to keep working on it together, enhancing the now existing ML-model in melanoma, but also starting to work on ML-models in other indications and treatments.”, Virtanen continues.
The cooperation has already expanded with additional cancer clinics starting to use the melanoma Tafinlar and Mekinist-specific module.
About Kaiku Health
Kaiku Health is a digital health intervention platform classified as a Medical Device in cancer care. Its algorithms screen symptoms, notify care teams and provide personalised support for patients. Kaiku Health has modules for over 25 cancer types across different cancer care pathways. Since 2020 Kaiku Health has been a part of Elekta. TAFINLAR® and MEKINIST® are registered trademarks of Novartis AG.