• Collaboration focus: Mental health issues for cancer patients and survivors 
• Collaboration launched: 2021 

Company Overview 

Blue Note Therapeutics is a prescription digital therapeutics company singularly dedicated to serving patients experiencing cancer. In September 2021, the company announced a new collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) through the MSK Innovation Hub to help advance the development of Blue Note’s prescription digital therapeutic (PDT) candidate to treat fear of cancer recurrence. 

Problems We’re Solving 

There are about 18 million cancer patients and survivors in the U.S. today. Nearly half of all cancer patients experience psychosocial distress, anxiety, or depression. All too many of these cancer patients and survivors are never referred to mental health specialists. “Nearly all cancer patients face fear and uncertainty following their treatment, and for some, such fear can be distressing, preoccupying, and debilitating,” said Wendy Lichtenthal, PhD, Attending Psychologist at MSK. “This can impact their mental and physical health, experience with medical care, and quality of life. We look forward to collaborating with Blue Note on this important project to help patients cope with their fears of recurrence.” 

Working with MSK 

The collaborators will come together under MSK’s Innovation Hub program. “We are excited for this opportunity to further our partnership with MSK,” said Geoffrey Eich, CEO of Blue Note Therapeutics. “This new collaboration will give Blue Note access to leading cancer experts to advise and inform the development of our therapeutic, increasing our capacity to reach patients.” 

• Collaboration focus: Biosimulation program to evaluate cancer treatment efficacy—with an initial focus on CAR T-cell treatments for patients with multiple myeloma 
• Collaboration launched: 2022 

Company Overview 

Certara accelerates medicines using proprietary biosimulation software, technology, and services to transform traditional drug discovery and development. Its clients include more than 2,000 biopharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies across 62 countries. 

Problems We’re Solving 

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is an immunotherapy that uses specially altered T-cells in the immune system to fight some forms of blood cancer. This new biosimulation platform initially aims to address key questions on the optimal dose and regimen for CAR T-cell therapies in patients with multiple myeloma and will leverage de-identified MSK clinical data.  Certara hopes to expand the use of the CAR T-cell biosimulation platform to evaluate combination therapies and enhance the manufacturing learning process for next generation CAR T-cell therapies.  

“While approved CAR T products for multiple myeloma are effective, relapses are common and additional efforts are needed to optimize these treatments,” said Dr. Sham Mailankody, an MSK medical oncologist and one of the project’s collaborators. “We are hopeful that this effort will provide important insights into improving the efficacy of these treatments, including identifying factors associated with durable response, and understanding future direction in terms of combination strategies.” 

Working with MSK 

Certara will be working with the MSK Innovation Hub to create a CAR T-cell therapy biosimulation platform.   

“We are very pleased to work with MSK, a leading cancer hospital and research institution, to accelerate innovative solutions and deliver meaningful impact to cancer patients,” said Piet van der Graaf, senior vice president of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology at Certara.  “After CAR T-cell therapy is infused into the body, the altered T-cells multiply and proliferate, so a precise and personalized dosing approach is essential. We are excited to use biosimulation to identify optimal therapeutic strategies using in silico, computer-based trials to guide precision dosing in virtual and actual patients.” 

• Collaboration focus: Enabling efficient standardization of clinical practice through the implementation of digital clinical guidelines and program manuals for the MSK Blood and Marrow Transplant (BMT) service.
• Collaboration launched: 2022

Company Overview 

Curbside Health develops clinical decision support software that aligns health systems and clinicians to more efficiently deliver optimal care. The company was founded by physicians and technologists to combine the best of clinical evidence with the realities of healthcare delivery and with opportunities of modern web technology. Curbside’s platform aims to enable hospitals to improve clinical outcomes and operational efficiencies by using technology to help clinicians and hospital administrators to expand and update their clinical content library, fully disseminate this content, and then enhance the actual utilization of these resources at the point-of-care.

Problems We’re Solving 

Curbside’s solution is a digital clinical content platform in which clinicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and others can asynchronously collaborate to edit and manage clinical content including clinical guidelines and pathways. The product user experience is designed for medicine and healthcare delivery, allowing layering of supporting information or references for efficient use.  Reporting dashboards, user data, and clinician user feedback flow directly to the editors, managers, and administrators. 

Through the MSK Innovation Hub collaboration, healthcare practitioners within MSK’s Blood and Marrow Transplant (BMT) Service will collaborate with Curbside to deploy MSK’s clinical guidelines on Curbside’s platform. Clinical content in MSK’s BMT Service content library will be shared, edited, updated, and disseminated, with the goal of demonstrating the Curbside platform’s efficiencies, quality controls, scalability, and impact at point-of-care in a leading oncology-focused clinical environment.

“We are very pleased to join forces with Curbside to establish more efficient pathways to collaborate with colleagues across MSK and beyond to create, maintain, and share standard of care and best practice clinical guidelines for the care of patients undergoing Transplant and Cellular Therapies. Our collaboration allows for streamlined digital solutions that enhance patient care, outcomes and teamwork across institutions,” said Maria Cancio, MD, Associate Attending Physician, MSK.

Working with MSK 

“Clinical pathways and guidelines are powerful resources in the effort to consistently deliver the highest quality evidence-based care, especially in complex and rapidly changing fields of medicine such as oncology.  However, translating their theoretical value to the frontline decisions that matter requires that the content is customized, efficient to create, and seamless to share and utilize.  We are delighted to partner with MSK to provide and advance the Curbside platform in pursuit of advancing cancer care through integrated clinical effectiveness,” said Eric Leroux, MD, co-founder, Curbside Health.

• Collaboration focus: Utilizing AI-driven biosimulation to better match prostate cancer patients to clinical trials and other treatment options 
• Collaboration launched: 2021 

Company Overview 

GNS Healthcare is an AI-driven biosimulation company working to transform the way drug therapies are discovered, developed, and utilized.  GNS has leveraged its pioneering Causal AI technology to exploit the recent explosive growth of multi-omics and clinical data to create Gemini—the virtual patient in oncology, neurodegeneration, and immunology—by revealing the hidden circuitry of disease.  Virtual patients allow for clinical trials across cohorts of diverse patients to be conducted computationally by simulating disease progression and drug response at the individual patient level. In 2021, the company announced a new collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering through the MSK Innovation Hub to leverage longitudinal multi-modal prostate cancer patient data and world-class prostate cancer expertise with GNS’ Gemini Prostate Cancer patient. 

Problems We’re Solving 

This collaboration will address key questions for prostate cancer patients, including identifying subtypes of aggressive disease and discovering novel drug targets and drivers of patient response to an increasing array of therapeutics. These insights will enable the design of highly sophisticated clinical trials, and generate evidence of comparative effectiveness between drugs and simulate treatment sequencing. 

“The results generated from GNS’ transformative AI approach are compelling, and I believe this ongoing collaboration will provide novel insights into prostate cancer that will directly improve patient care,” said Howard I. Scher, MD, MSK medical oncologist and Head of the Biomarker Development Program. 

Working with MSK  

“Collaborating with the MSK Innovation Hub will help to accelerate the discovery and development of new, more targeted and effective treatments for prostate cancer patients,” said GNS CEO and Co-Founder, Colin Hill.  “Simulating these virtual patient models allows us to understand what treatments work for which patients and why, improving clinical trial design and generating real-world evidence that maximizes the impact of drugs for patients. This has been a long road, but we are now at the point of being able to deliver true personalized treatments that work.” 

• Collaboration focus: Meaningful improvement to the process of data collection for cancer research by reducing the requirement for time-consuming data duplication and source data verification (SDV).
• Collaboration launched: 2023

Company Overview

IgniteData is transforming the future of clinical trials through its cloud-based Virtual Research Assistant, Archer. A system-agnostic solution, Archer brings modern interoperability between EHR and key research systems, such as EDC, to provide seamless, secure transfer of clinically-validate data for clinical trials.

Problems We’re Solving

IgniteData’s system-agnostic electronic data transfer technology, Archer, eliminates the need for researchers to manually transcribe data such as vital signs and labs, domains that typically account for as much as 50% of total data required. Archer’s purpose-built Smart Mapping Engine matches site and sponsor ontologies and normalises complex healthcare data. The solution enables research staff to rapidly transfer existing regulatory-grade data from the EHR to the sponsor’s study database, eliminating data entry errors, and significantly reducing SDV and query resolution time. Scalable by design, Archer is purpose-built for multi-site trials, multiple users, different hospital systems, and complex data collection requirements.

“We are excited to collaborate with IgniteData given our shared goal of unlocking the power of EHR data for use in clinical research,” said Joe Lengfellner, Senior Director, Clinical Research Informatics at MSK. “This collaboration aspires to automate the routine tasks performed by our research teams and quicken the pace of clinical trial execution, driving us toward our ultimate goal of changing how the world treats cancer through research.”

Working with MSK

“Today, a typical phase 3 oncology study generates an average of 3.6 million data points. More than half of this eSource data already exists in patients’ electronic medical records, yet it is still being painstakingly transcribed into study databases, burdening research staff and creating inefficiencies and delays, said IgniteData’s CEO and Co-founder, Dan Hydes. “As pioneers of EHR-to-EDC data interoperability, and in collaboration with MSK’s Innovation Hub, we are proud to lead the drive to solve the clinical trial data challenge and accelerate the pace of clinical trial digital transformation alongside the world’s leading cancer center.”

Next Steps

As the IgniteData/MSK collaboration continues to yield favorable results and expand across a growing number of MSK-based clinical trials, this project has now transitioned to CRIC, MSK’s Clinical Research Innovation Consortium. 

• Collaboration focus: Applying personalized pharmacology models and machine learning to identify and treat cancer patients at risk of developing neutropenia 
• Collaboration launched: 2021 

Company Overview 

InsightRX is a healthcare technology company that has developed a cloud-based platform for precision medicine and clinical analytics designed to individualize treatment at the point of care. The platform leverages patient-specific data, pharmacology models, and machine learning to understand each patient’s unique pharmacological profile and can be integrated seamlessly within a clinical workflow. In 2021, the company announced a new collaboration through the MSK Innovation Hub, which will focus on validating and potentially improving pharmacology models used in InsightRX’s Nova precision dosing platform to enable clinicians to predict neutropenia. 

Problems We’re Solving 

Infections linked to neutropenia are among the most serious side effects of chemotherapy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which cites studies showing that 60,000 cancer patients in the U.S. are hospitalized with neutropenia each year, with 4,000 dying of neutropenia-related fever. A study published in the Journal of Oncology Practice estimated the cancer-related neutropenia hospitalizations in the U.S. cost $2.3 billion for adults and $439 million for children in 2012, totaling 8.3% of all cancer-related hospitalization costs.  

“We created the MSK Innovation Hub because we know collaboration can spark the innovations needed to help more efficiently treat cancer and prevent treatment-associated complications,” said Pedram Razavi, MD, PhD, a breast medical oncologist and physician-scientist at MSK. “We look forward to collaborating with InsightRX to help clinicians better predict neutropenia and improve outcomes among people receiving chemotherapy.” 

Working with MSK 

 “It truly is an honor for InsightRX to be selected by MSK as an MSK Innovation Hub collaborator,” said Sirj Goswami, PhD, CEO and co-founder of InsightRX. “Working together, we can accelerate the development of precision medicine modules for oncology products that will help improve care for cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.” 

• Collaboration Focus:  How soundscapes can positively affect both patients and staff in healthcare environments
• Collaboration Launched: 2023

Company Overview

Moodsonic is a soundscaping company that works with many of the world’s largest organizations to create intelligent, responsive soundscapes that improve well-being in buildings like workplaces, healthcare environments and schools. Their soundscapes have been used to measurably improve outcomes like relaxation, mood, focus, creativity and perceptions of place. Moodsonic’s collaboration with the MSK Innovation Hub will research nature-based soundscaping for patient recovery in the oncology setting.

Problems We’re Solving

The goals of the MSK Innovation Hub/Moodsonic collaboration are to generate new insights into how soundscapes influence the patient experience, develop new practices and technologies, and ultimately improve both patient and hospital staff’s well-being through sound.  This collaboration will be piloted at New York City, initially in post-operative recovery rooms at MSK’s Josie Robertson Center. Together, the teams will test soundscaping technology developed by Moodsonic to hone the beneficial impact for patients recovering from cancer surgery and create multi-sensory biophilic environments.  

“We are excited to collaborate with Moodsonic to create more patient-centric auditory experiences for our healthcare environments,” said Daniel Stein, Senior Director, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, MSK. “By combining MSK’s world-class cancer care with Moodsonic’s audio expertise and unique soundscaping techniques, we aspire to create more novel audio experiences to help our patients feel and heal better.”

Working with MSK

“There’s a huge opportunity to use sound as a positive design tool in clinical settings,” said Jeff Larson, Director of Product at Moodsonic. “Sound in healthcare is a complex challenge. Patients’ conditions and individual sensory needs can vary massively. It’s a problem that requires unique expertise and adaptive, research driven solutions. We’re thrilled to collaborate with leading cancer care center MSK on this venture to create healthier environments for patients and staff.”

• Collaboration focus: Optimize bioinformatics-based software to evaluate cancer drug resistance using advanced stem-cell-based diagnostics to increase cancer treatment efficacy—with an initial focus on patients with triple-negative breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.
• Collaboration launched: 2022

Company Overview

NewStem is a Jerusalem-based biotech platform company with a novel precision-medicine technology that can increase chemotherapy’s effectiveness. NewStem’s technology, including the NewStem Software Diagnostic Device (“NSDD”), can predict patients’ resistance to chemotherapy allowing for better, targeted cancer treatments and the potential to reduce resistance to chemotherapy.

Problems We’re Solving

Resistance is the leading cause of relapse in cancer and one of the significant causes of death due to the disease. Drug resistance (whether pre-existing or generated after therapy) is responsible for over 90% of deaths in cancer patients receiving traditional chemotherapeutics or novel targeted drug treatments. NewStem hopes that, armed with NSDD-based intelligence, oncologists will be able to make more informed treatment decisions.

“We believe that impactful clinical innovations can be achieved through collaborative projects that combine deep clinical knowledge with cutting-edge technical capabilities,” added Pedram Razavi, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist and Director of Liquid Biopsy Technologies & Genomics at MSK. “We look forward to collaborating with NewStem through the MSK Innovation Hub to develop new innovations for bringing better treatments to cancer patients.”

Working with MSK

“Despite enormous progress over decades, resistance to anti-cancer drugs continues to be a major problem in treating cancer, the second-leading cause of death globally,” said Ayelet Dilion-Mashiah, Chief Executive Officer of NewStem Ltd. “We are excited to work with the MSK Innovation Hub in a collaboration that will bring together experts with the deepest expertise and a common goal to improve the lives of people with cancer.”

• Collaboration focus: Applying digital health technologies to data analytics, in order to better target treatment therapies and improve outcomes for bile duct cancer patients. 
• Collaboration launched: 2021 

Company Overview 

Owkin is a French-American startup that specializes in AI and federated learning for medical research. The Owkin Platform connects life sciences companies with world-class academic researchers and hospitals to share deep medical insights for drug discovery and development.  Using federated learning and breakthrough collaborative AI technology, Owkin enables its partners to unlock siloed datasets while protecting patient privacy and securing proprietary data. Through sharing high-value insights, the company powers unprecedented collaboration to improve patient outcomes. In 2021, the company announced a new collaboration with MSK aimed at enabling clinicians to better target treatments and drastically improve survival times for bile duct cancer. 

Problems We’re Solving  

Cancer that develops in the bile ducts within the liver, known as intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, is often only diagnosed at an advanced stage. As a result, median survival is approximately seven months following diagnosis. Innovative treatment can double survival time, but it has historically been difficult to identify which patients would benefit from the treatment.  To help improve these statistics, Owkin will train deep learning models using deidentified data from MSK patients in order to predict the prognosis of cholangiocarcinoma and discover biomarkers of treatment response.  

“I am excited to be part of this cutting-edge research collaboration that will have a positive impact on how clinicians evaluate and treat patients with intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, and potentially other cancers, as well,” said William R. Jarnigan MD, FACS, Chief of the MSK Hepatopancreatobiliary Service. 

Working with MSK 

“We’re excited to help MSK improve the treatment of some of the most aggressive forms of cancer. The richness and uniqueness of its research cohorts, together with Owkin’s extensive expertise in developing predictive AI models, will pave the way for forward-thinking science,” said Meriem Sefta PhD, Chief Data and Clinical Solutions Officer at Owkin. “We are thrilled to initiate this collaborative project with the MSK Innovation Hub.”

• Collaboration focus: Analyze patient records to extract information to help scientists and clinicians further their research and develop new cancer treatment models using disease-specific patient summaries.
• Collaboration launched: 2022

Company Overview

Realyze Intelligence enables healthcare organizations to clinically understand patients and patient populations in a more precise way. Applying the latest AI technologies alongside a sophisticated clinical knowledgebase, Realyze models the patient story by unlocking the information from across the entire patient chart, including narrative notes. Problems We’re Solving

Some of the most important insights in a patient’s medical record can be found in the free text portion, but combing through this information is time-consuming and costly. With Realyze’s artificial intelligence, patient records can be efficiently mined, providing clinicians with actionable information that can be used to make more informed and timely treatment decisions, which can be particularly critical for early-stage cancer patients.

“We look forward to working with Realyze through this innovative collaboration,” said John Philip, Senior Director, Product Management for Research Informatics at MSK. “The data within the clinical notes of patients’ medical records may unlock important scientific and clinical correlations. Being able to pull this information in a more efficient way could help connect patients with important resources and help physicians develop the most optimal care plans for their patients.”

Working with MSK

“Our goal is to make it easier and more efficient for health systems and cancer centers to understand and use their data to improve patient care,” said Aaron Brauser, President and CEO of Realyze. “By working with MSK Innovation Hub, we have the opportunity to improve the care and quality of life for patients undergoing cancer treatments by ensuring their health care team has the most accurate and meaningful information.”