DURHAM – Two companies both aiming at turning reams of data into useful information for the healthcare and biotech industries have joined forces. Target RWE, which provides real-world evidence (RWE) solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries has acquired NoviSci Inc., a software analytics and services company. Both are located in Durham.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. All 20 Novisci employees and executives will join the combined company. Target’RWE’s Neal Bibeau will helm the company as CEO, the post he currently holds with Target. NoviSci’s co-founder and Chief Scientist, M. Alan Brookhart, will be chief science officer. Brookhart is an expert in one of the NoviSci technologies.
M. Allan Brookhart, will be chief scientific officer at the combined company. NoviSci photo.
Related to this acquisition, Amgen Inc., a strategic investor in and collaborator with NoviSci, has also made a strategic investment in the combined company to fuel growth, joining existing Target RWE investors Norwest Venture Partners and 22C Capital.
NoviSci developed software that enables the visualization and analysis of health data using modern epidemiological methods and sound scientific principles.
A group of academic experts from Duke University School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who had been collaborating for years founded NoviSci two years ago. The founders and leaders of the company retain their academic positions. They include Aaron McKethan, and Brookhart.
Rigor needed to meet regulations
Since the data Novisci crunches is for the highly regulated healthcare and biotech sectors, it must meet rigorous standards that will hold up under peer review and regulatory scrutiny.
So, NovSci applies epidemiologic methods and causal inference techniques from the fields of epidemiology and statistics to complex real-world data to support its partners in research and industry. Epidemiology is the area of medicine dealing with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.
NoviSci has built a novel repository of rigorously developed interactive real-world studies that can be adapted to new datasets and populations. All study results are rendered in NoviSci’s secure web-based environment, featuring interactive content and data visualizations that can be updated with accumulating data. NoviSci’s tools also support all critical aspects of scientific knowledge production, peer review, and sharing.
The idea for NoviSci evolved when CEO Aaron McKethan’s father had late-stage lung cancer. McKethan asked the doctor some fairly simple questions about his proposed treatment, such as what percentage of patients took that particular chemotherapy and how they faired. The doctor had no way of answering based on any significant data.
Aaron McKethan was CEO of NovaSci.
Earlier seed investments in NoviSci
NoviSci technology combined with Target RWE’s will make it possible for doctors, researchers, and others to find and use solid, scientifically rigorous analysis in a relatively digestible form that automatically updates as new information is available.
NoviSci previously received a seed investment from Amgen Ventures and Hatteras Venture Partners and is based in the American Underground campus in downtown Durham, which has been very helpful to the company in more ways than just office space, said Novisci CEO Arron Mckethan in an interview with WRAL TechWire.
He said the combination of the two companies is very synergistic. When NoviSci made connections with Target via what McKethan calls the Triangle Biotech ecosystem, it dropped the A round it was working on in favor of working out a combination.
The approach, data technologies, and expertise of both companies are complementary, McKethan noted. He said the combination will allow two already fast-growing startups to grow even faster.
The acquisition significantly broadens Target RWE’s data analytics capabilities and will enable the company to meet increasing demand for high-quality evidence from real-world data, the companies said.
Target was formed in 2015 Target RWE was created as an outcome of the success of HCV-TARGET, a case study of the Target RWE Model for hepatitis C. HCV-TARGET was a partnership between academia, the FDA, and industry established in 2011 by Michael W. Fried, MD, FAASLD and David R. Nelson, MD. To date, the study has enrolled over 14,000+ patients across 60 sites in North America and Europe.
Fried is cofounder and chief medical officer of Target. Meg Powell is also a cofounder.
Target RWE designs custom data sets, analyses, and evidence to address the complexities of healthcare evidence questions and quality initiatives. It developed a turnkey health evidence solution that rapidly aggregates real-world data (RWD) from a large network of participating sites (academic and community) globally.
Its data sets are aggregated from various data sources including registries, electronic medical records, patient outcomes measures, biospecimen analyses, and claims databases.
