There are a number of medical drugs that are difficult to dose for hospital systems around the world, causing adverse consequences if not given properly. These include chemotherapy for children, some medications used to treat infections and many others. OSF Ventures, a part of OSF Innovation, last year invested in a San Francisco company working to change that by giving physicians, nurses and clinical pharmacists the tools they need to significantly improve the process of dosing complex drugs, better known as precision medicine.
InsightRX has developed software to individualize pharmaceutical treatment based on a patient’s underlying biological and pharmacological characteristics. The company’s software platform leverages mathematical models, patient demographics, physiological characteristics, genomic data, drug concentrations and biomarkers to get a detailed understanding of a patient’s response to different treatment strategies.
After deep evaluation of the technology and input from our medical providers, we will soon begin using the software within OSF HealthCare. The effort beginning in April will use InsightRX to assist with dosing vancomycin, a high-risk antibiotic drug with a narrow therapeutic range. We will focus on our pediatric population at OSF HealthCare Children’s Hospital of Illinois.
Investment and partnership
OSF Ventures’ investment in April 2017 was made to support the InsightRX goal to revolutionize how complex drugs are administered to patients. Since then, OSF HealthCare clinical pharmacists and other clinicians have helped the company have helped the company identify specific pain points with respect to dosing and to better integrate into our organization’s processes and, by doing so, have also helped make the technology suitable for health care systems around the world.
“The benefit of that is that we have developed product/market fit, which will help us improve our strategy to enter the market,” said Sirj Goswami, Co-founder and CEO of InsightRX. “From our perspective, OSF HealthCare has been a great partner to really bounce ideas off of and to get our technology into the hands of clinicians and clinical pharmacists in a manner that is seamlessly integrated within clinical workflows.”
Goswami says clinical pharmacists and clinicians within OSF HealthCare will have access to the InsightRX solution, integrated into its Electronic Medical Record, to help guide the selection of optimal dosing regimens.
“We will compare the performance of InsightRX to the baseline, the time period in which the application was not being used.”
InsightRX and OSF HealthCare are also working on co-developing additional drug dosing modules to better serve our patients.
Why precision medicine?
Access to clinical leaders within OSF HealthCare has been instrumental in bringing companies such as InsightRX onboard to not only invest financially, but strategically as well. It was through this partnership, OSF Ventures learned this software has the potential to reduce hospitalization stays and improve outcomes. We also found InsightRX could allow OSF HealthCare to target specific patients for gene testing in order to dose certain medications appropriately.
There is no doubt in my mind that our venture work would not have progressed to this stage without the collaborative focus our environment encourages. We look forward to seeing the result of the InsightRX pilot and further working with the company to develop more drug dosing modules that will improve medication administration for health care systems everywhere.
Last Updated: March 1, 2018