Data sharing technology company Datavant announced it will acquire Aetion, a company focused on real-world evidence (RWE) in healthcare.
Aetion will join Datavant to offer an end-to-end real-world evidence platform, allowing healthcare and life sciences companies to respond to research questions about the clinical impact of therapies in development and in-market.
Davavant’s platform enables healthcare records to move between organizations, including more than 70,000 hospitals and clinics.
Aetion provides RWE offerings to biopharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, payers and regulators.
The companies will leverage their capabilities to create an end-to-end offering on data discovery, linkage, privacy, curation and advanced analysis, allowing their ecosystem and life sciences partners to create analytics-based insights.
The announcement comes after the launch of Datavant Connect, powered by AWS Clean Rooms, which “facilitates cloud-first data discovery and evaluation to accelerate time to insight.”
Via Datavant Connect, data can be combined with corresponding data sources.
According to the two companies, Aetion will increase the Datavant Connect platform’s data discovery features, strengthen privacy assessments, and give customers datasets and analytics.
In addition, the Aetion Evidence Platform will be available in AWS’ Marketplace.
“Real-world evidence has reached an inflection point where we have to start to make more sense out of the data,” Arnaub Chatterjee, president and general manager of life sciences, ecosystem and public sector at Datavant, told MobiHealthNews.
“By combining Datavant’s and Aetion’s complementary capabilities, we will be well-positioned to deliver new tools to determine data feasibility, querying, assessment and ultimately enable equitable access to data. One of the things I’m most excited about is being able to give our customers a new way to look at data and use it to solve really complex problems before, during and after commercialization.”
THE LARGER TREND
Datavant expanded its collaboration with pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim this month, to support Boehringer’s RWE initiatives.
The extended collaboration aims to leverage Datavant’s tokenization and data connectivity technologies to improve clinical development and initiate strategies across 75 additional clinical trials and multiple new molecular entities.
By applying Datavant’s technology across a broad portfolio of trials and launches, Boehringer Ingelheim aims to increase the integration of real-world data into drug development.
In 2023, Socially Determined partnered with Datavant to provide life sciences companies with data on social risk drivers to improve health equity and patient outcomes.
In 2021, MindMed turned to Datavant to help link its clinical trial data with external evidence from other clinical trials and real-world data sources.
A year before, Datavant closed $40 million in Series B funding. Transformation Capital led the rounds, with participation from Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JJDC, Cigna Ventures, and prior investors Roivant Sciences and Flex Capital.
That same year, Datavant acquired Ciox Health in a deal valued at $7.0 billion. The combined company focused on improving patient outcomes and reducing costs by removing impediments to the secure health data exchange.
In 2023, Aetion collaborated with the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE).
The OCE used Aetion’s Evidence Platform to find and analyze real-world data sources that could be used for cancer prevention, clinical care, diagnostics and treatment research.
The collaboration assessed real-world endpoints, measured healthcare disparities and evaluated causal inference methods. The research was scheduled to continue until 2027.
In 2022, Aetion acquired Replica Analytics, which gave Aetion new capabilities in synthetic RWE. The announcement came less than a year after Aetion secured a $110 million Series C funding round led by Warburg Pincus.
