Health technology company PicnicHealth announced it is moving into the oncology space and teaming up with AstraZeneca to build a registry to generate real-world data on breast cancer. 

The company says it will work with people living with cancer to collect and structure their medical records data to advance oncology research using robust datasets.  

Additionally, the California-based company announced a multiyear partnership with biopharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to create a registry to generate longitudinal real-world data from consenting U.S. patients diagnosed with stage 1 to stage 3 breast cancer. 

The registry, which patients can currently enroll in, will organize their medical records into a centralized portal and allow patients to contribute their de-identified data to breast cancer research. 

"We're best-suited for partners that want to leverage our experience working directly with patients to develop richer, more complete datasets that offer a window into the patient experience for patients with early cancer diagnoses. Since these patients are often likely to survive their cancers or live with cancer for an extended period of time, working with these patients to develop datasets plays to our strength in patient engagement and our ability to synthesize patient records across care sites along with patient-reported outcomes," Dr. Dan Drozd, chief medical officer at PicnicHealth, told MobiHealthNews in an email. 

THE LARGER TREND 

In April, PicnicHealth announced a partnership with pharma giant Roche and its subsidiary Genentech to accelerate neurological disease research through investments in real-world data. Roche planned to leverage PicnicHealth's datasets for Alzheimer’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease-related dementias and myasthenia gravis, a chronic autoimmune disorder resulting in weakness of the skeletal muscles.

The same month, it announced it would partner with global nonprofit company CureDuchenne, which focuses on finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The pair would bolster real-world evidence generation for the CureDuchenne Link platform. 

Last year, PicnicHealth scored $60 million in Series C funding, two years after it secured $35 million in equity financing.

The data company also announced a partnership with global biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb to merge datasets to better understand patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.  

In 2021, PicnicHealth and Komodo Health formed a partnership to jointly use their products to create a real-world patient data pool using de-identified data from payers, providers, labs and electronic health records, and then provide that data to biopharmaceutical and academic communities.