physIQ licenses virtual trial tech to Janssen in multi-year deal

Biosensor firm physIQ has licensed its technology to Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen pharma unit in a multi-year deal, to investigate use of wearable sensors in virtual clinical trials.

Janssen will be able to scale up use of Chicago-based physIQ’s biosensors to support both R&D and commercial activities.

The pharma company will use the technology known as accelerateIQ to collect data across its clinical studies through a variety of wearable biosensors.

physIQ has a portfolio of FDA-cleared digital biomarkers and a medical-grade platform that can transform raw sensor data into clinical insight.

Continuous data collected from wearable biosensors is considered a cutting-edge technology that could revolutionise clinical development and marketing of drugs.

But there are technical challenges from collecting and processing the stream of data that have limited use of the technology on a large scale, physIQ said.

The companies hope the collaboration could help overcome these challenges and realise the technology’s potential.

No financial details were disclosed.

Chris Economos, chief commercial officer of physIQ, said: “We have built a platform that can accommodate the unknowns of a rapidly-evolving regulated digital medicine landscape – any sensor, any data type, and any algorithm.”

The company has already conducted a heart failure study, which tested accuracy of non-invasive monitoring in predicting heart failure hospitalisation.

Findings of the LINK-HF study were published last year in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure found that wearable sensors can accurately predict impending hospitalisation with comparable accuracy to implantable devices.

It concluded that the clinical efficacy and use of the approach should be further tested, while noting its potential to reduce healthcare costs.

Last year a survey revealed that the pandemic had driven uptake of digital clinical trials because of the need to reduce close contact between clinicians and patients.

The poll of 114 triallists by clinical data specialist ERT found 82% of them found organisations aery using “virtual trial” approaches.