BELGIUM – BrightInsight, the leading global platform for biopharma and medtech regulated digital health solutions, has announced a collaboration with global biopharma, UCB, to develop digital care solutions for rare diseases.

UCB chose the proven, scalable Brightinsight Platform to reduce time to market for UCB’s digital care solutions while remaining compliant.

BrightInsight will develop and market a digital disease management solution to help patients with Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a rare autoimmune disease that disrupts nerve-muscle communication that affects over 700,000 people worldwide and 36,000 to 60,000 in the United States.

UCB’s digital care solutions

The BrightInsight Platform, built under a robust Quality Management System to support regulated products, enables UCB to develop and launch digital health solutions at scale while adhering to global privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.

UCB’s digital disease management solution will first include a mobile patient app to support patients with Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a rare autoimmune disease that disrupts how nerves communicate with muscles.

It will be built on the BrightInsight Platform, which is built on Google Cloud. The solution and its future evolution will assist those living with MG in better managing their condition and will support UCB’s commitment to providing digital solutions to patients with rare diseases in order to improve overall care and outcomes.

The solution will initially be available in the United States, with plans to incorporate feedback and patient insights into future versions before launching on a global scale.

Why digital care matters for rare diseases

Patients and providers face a number of challenges when dealing with rare diseases, making it a promising field for digital solutions.

Patients can wait years for a diagnosis because rare diseases can be difficult to diagnose and frequently necessitate multiple referrals to specialists.

This can lead to a loss of trust in medical providers and a decrease in adherence. Powerful algorithms hosted on a digital platform can assist patients in getting diagnosed and started on the right treatment as soon as possible.

Apps and other digital tools, such as medication reminders and tracking tools, disease management information, patient journals, and a secure line of communication with their healthcare providers, can help support a patient’s treatment journey and enable real-time information sharing to optimize care.

These tools can help patients in remote areas connect with specialty care from the comfort of their own homes.

A systematic review of digital interventions for one rare disease discovered that 94% of participants improved their self-management outcomes.

Furthermore, 63 percent expressed high levels of satisfaction and acceptability with the interventions.

UCB is the third pharmaceutical company to join forces with BrightInsight in the field of rare diseases.

Other BrightInsight collaborations include Roche/Genentech, which created a dosing calculator for physicians treating patients with Hemophilia A, and CSL Behring, which created a patient app for its flagship drug, Hizentra.

Hizentra is used to treat Primary Immune Deficiency (PID) or Chronic lnflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP).

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