Remission Coach®: A Revolutionary Clinical Trials Platform to be Launched This Year by ICAN and MediSapiens

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, January 27, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

U.S.-based cancer patient advocacy and charitable organization, International Cancer Advocacy Network (ICAN), in collaboration with Finland-based bioinformatics company MediSapiens, announced their intent to launch Remission Coach^® (patent pending) this year in a presentation at the Personalized Medicine World Conference in Mountain View, California.  

Remission Coach^® is a web-based solution that addresses the urgency of cancer management by providing patients with a personalized platform for actively determining the most appropriate clinical trial for that patient's disease and treatment history.

According to Robert H. Tamis, M. D., ICAN's Chairman of Health Information Technology Initiatives, "Remission Coach^® offers a secure, sophisticated, yet easy-to-use electronic interface for patients and their caregivers to safely enter and store clinical information, such as pathology and imaging reports, treatment history, and molecular profiling data.  The clinical trials industry and patients will be able to use Remission Coach^® for immediate access to critical information that will vastly improve and accelerate the recruitment of trial candidates while minimizing the notoriously crippling costs of patient accrual."

Only a very small percentage of late-stage cancer patients are informed by their oncology teams about clinical trials.  This is not for lack of effort or caring but is typically the result of time pressures that do not allow for investigation or follow-up among oncologist, clinical trial sponsors, and patient.

One of the many advances featured in Remission Coach^® is its predictive ability to match patients to ongoing clinical trials based on clinical histories and molecular profiling results.  Patients can quickly seek clinical trials for which they are eligible, providing them with potential life-extending opportunities otherwise unknown to them.

Placing a high priority on patient security and privacy, Remission Coach^® is a HIPAA-compliant platform with a built-in system that anonymizes and de-identifies patient data.  For biopharmaceutical, government, and academic sponsors and principal investigators, Remission Coach^® features a dedicated researcher interface powered with intelligent filtering tools.  This includes controlled search engine access to rapidly identify patient cases, on the basis of de-identified data, that are eligible for clinical trials.  

When a match is found, the company, investigator, contract research organization, or clinical trials recruiting team can send a contact request to the anonymous patient, who has the option of whether or not to respond to such a request.

Remission Coach^® provides "urgency to patients," said Scott M. Kahn, Ph.D., Chairman of ICAN's Biomarkers Council, "while simultaneously enabling drug developers to expedite clinical trial enrollments and patient retention, thus significantly lowering the costs of patient accrual.  Important short and long-term benefits of Remission Coach^® include accelerating clinical trial accrual and retention, expediting regulatory approval of novel patient therapies, and therefore making drugs available to cancer patients more quickly and more effectively."

Remission Coach^® provides patients and caregivers additional benefits since it can be used as a stand-alone option that brings personalized medicine and disease management to their fingertips.  The easily navigable Remission Coach^® interface helps to distinguish between multiple, and often confusing, names for diseases, treatments, genes, and other parameters.  Patients can access their data securely and remotely, thereby providing them with a greater comfort level in talking with their medical teams and making decisions about their treatment.

Rami Käkӧnen, President of MediSapiens (US), Inc. stated that, "Remission Coach^® will dramatically improve the chances of matching a patient with an appropriate clinical trial.  It is a tragedy that so many patients never have the opportunity to see if they could be helped by a potentially life-extending therapy.  MediSapiens is proud to have helped develop Remission Coach^® and we look forward to its launch.  Above all, we look forward to seeing it help patients."

About ICAN 

ICAN, International Cancer Advocacy Network (http://www.askican.org) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt cancer charitable organization based in Phoenix, Arizona, consisting of a small staff and a global network of more than 1100 volunteers.  ICAN's goal for each and every patient is to extend life with the highest achievable quality of life.  Since its inception in 1996, ICAN-working with distinguished medical and cancer researchers on its Physicians, Biomarkers, and Scientific Advisory Councils-has assisted more than 8,000 patients, families, and caregivers throughout the United States, most U.S. Territories, and in 53 countries.

ICAN's Personalized Medicine Cancer Case Navigation Programs assist late-stage cancer patients with direct navigation of their cases, customized advocacy and empowerment services, clinical trials research, compassionate use research, and interpretation of their molecular profiling reports.  ICAN handles cancers ranging from the most commonly diagnosed malignancies to the rarest of tumors.  

For the past four years, ICAN has received "Top Rated Health Care Nonprofit" awards from Great Nonprofits and has the highest ratings on VolunteerMatch.org as well as a consistent Gold Seal ranking on GuideStar.org.  More than 94 percent of all revenue and resources are devoted to ICAN's Patient Services and Public Education initiatives.

Remission Coach® is a product of ICAN's Health Information Technology Initiatives led by the Chairman of ICAN's Physicians Advisory Council, Robert H. Tamis, M.D.  ICAN is also developing mobile apps that will assist patients battling chronic and lethal disease.

About MediSapiens, Inc. 

MediSapiens, Inc. (http://www.medisapiens.com) is a bioinformatics company, based in Helsinki, Finland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a strong background in pharmaceutical research and translational genomics. The company provides pharmaceutical and biomedical research organizations with tools that help them design more effective personalized drugs against life-threatening diseases.

MediSapiens creates powerful and intuitive software platforms to manage, integrate, and visualize complex multi-dimensional datasets, such as genomic sequencing data.  The company's goal is to drive medicine forward by developing tools that provide scientists with a way to quickly analyze and visualize vast amounts of data and turn it into knowledge that fuels innovation.

Media Contact:
Marcia Horn, J.D., President and CEO, ICAN
+1-602-618-0183
[email protected]

SOURCE MediSapiens