Datavant, Aetion merger creates real-world data force
Health tech firm Datavant has reached an agreement to acquire Aetion, a specialist in real-world evidence (RWE), pooling their resources in the category as RWE moves into mainstream use in healthcare decision-making.
Once the deal closes, it will create "an end-to-end RWE platform, enabling healthcare and life sciences companies to more efficiently answer research questions about the clinical impact of therapies in development and in market," according to the companies.
The use of RWE has grown rapidly in pharma over the last few years, not only to gauge how experimental therapies may perform outside randomised clinical trials, but also to aid the clinical development process and provide important data for pricing discussions once medicines have been approved.
The deal marks another expansion for Datavant, which spun out of Roivant in 2018 and merged with Ciox in 2021 to create what – at the time – was claimed to be the largest health data company operating in the US market.
That merger brought together Datavant's cloud-based platform that helps life sciences and healthcare groups manage, secure and share anonymised data and Ciox's expertise in handling and analysing electronic medical records and generating RWE from clinical data, which will now be souped up by bundling in Aetion's platform.
The takeover coincides with the launch of Aetion Activate, software that creates a collaborative, auditable, and secure platform to help biostatisticians and data scientists analyse RWE at scale, which strips out the need for manual data preparation that can lead to errors.
"As Datavant has grown and scaled, our life sciences and ecosystem partners have been asking us for a deeper capability set to bring together disparate data sources so they can tap into a more comprehensive and longitudinal view of patient health across the product lifecycle," said Kyle Armbrester, Datavant's chief executive.
"The addition of Aetion's team of scientists and technologists further bolsters our complementary capabilities and expertise so we can better leverage data from our ecosystem of partners to support efforts before, during, and after commercialisation – generating evidence from trial to treatment and beyond to deliver life-improving therapies."
Upon closing, Datavant and Aetion will have a combined ecosystem of over 300 data partners. Aetion CEO Jeremy Rassen said the merger will create an offering that will help advance "confident, data-driven decisions that improve patient care."
Image by Philip Neumann from Pixabay
