MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering and Informa Pharma Intelligence Launch Analytics Initiative for Life Sciences Professionals

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 4, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) and Informa Pharma Intelligence announced Project ALPHA (Analytics for Life-sciences Professionals and Healthcare Advocates), an initiative to provide timely and more accurate estimates of the risks and rewards of clinical trials to the entire biopharma ecosystem. The goal of Project ALPHA is to accelerate biomedical innovation by helping investors, regulators, payers, and biopharmaceutical companies better assess the opportunities of biomedical R&D, allowing all stakeholders to manage their investments more efficiently.

"More accurate risk metrics will eventually lead to fewer big failures, faster approval times, cost savings to the entire healthcare system and more investment capital for developing breakthrough therapies," says Andrew W. Lo, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the LFE, "all of which means more, and better, therapies to patients sooner."

The first set of analytics to be included as part of Project ALPHA are clinical success rate metrics, based on algorithms developed by MIT researchers and published online in Biostatistics in January 2018.  Jointly developed by the LFE and Informa, these metrics will be made freely available. The article, "Estimation of Clinical Trial Success Rates and Related Parameters," leverages Informa's Citeline drug and clinical trials data sets, and assesses clinical success from pre-clinical to launch, across nine therapeutic groups, providing the most comprehensive view on clinical success rates ever published.

Project ALPHA will distribute risk analytics via an LFE-hosted website, http://projectalpha.mit.edu, which will provide regularly updated aggregate clinical success rates and durations, as well as disaggregated estimates across trial features such as disease type, clinical phase, time, and lead indication status.   "We're excited to be collaborating with Andrew Lo and the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering to leverage our data and biopharma expertise with their research capabilities in risk management and financial analytics," said Mark Gordon, president of product & innovation in Informa's business intelligence division.

To encourage additional analyses using the metrics and the data behind them, Informa will make its commercial data sets available to academic researchers through an academic licensing program and a research proposal review process.

MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering
The MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) is a research center focused on the quantitative analysis of financial markets and institutions using mathematical, statistical, and computational models and methods. The goal of the LFE is to support and promote academic advances in financial engineering and computational finance that can be directly applied for the betterment of the world. To do that, LFE faculty, students, and staff engage with industry professionals, regulators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to develop and apply new financial technologies to practical and socially important settings.

About Informa Pharma Intelligence
Informa Pharma Intelligence powers a full suite of analysis products—Datamonitor Healthcare, Sitetrove, Trialtrove, Pharmaprojects, Medtrack, Biomedtracker, Scrip, Pink Sheet and In Vivo – to deliver the data needed by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry to make decisions and create real-world opportunities for growth.

With more than 500 analysts keeping their fingers on the pulse of the industry, no key disease, clinical trial, drug approval or R&D project isn't covered through the breadth and depth of data available to customers. For more information visit pharmaintelligence.informa.com.

About Citeline
Citeline, part of Informa's Pharma Intelligence vertical, is the world's most comprehensive source of real-time R&D intelligence for the pharmaceutical industry, featuring an unmatched intelligence collection and enrichment of global clinical trials, clinical trial investigator profiles and drug development pipelines.

Citeline is the R&D Intelligence arm of Informa's Pharma Intelligence vertical, one of the world's leading providers of drug, device, company, clinical trial and market intelligence in the pharma and medtech markets.  For more information, visit pharmaintelligence.informa.com. 

SOURCE MIT Sloan School of Management

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