Better data for better therapies: The case for building health data platforms

The past decade has seen an important and, for many patients, a life-changing rise in the number of innovative new drugs reaching the market to treat diseases such as multiple sclerosis, malaria, and subtypes of certain cancers (such as melanoma or leukemia). In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration approved an average of 41 new molecular entities (including biologic license applications) each year from 2011 to 2020--almost double the number in the previous decade. Despite the immense costs of such achievements, 2 2. Asher Mullard, "New drugs cost US $2.6 billion to develop," Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, December 1, 2014. A major barrier is the daunting challenge of understanding the multifactorial nature of many diseases coupled with the vast set of variables in therapy design. Very few diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, are linked to variants in single genes. Drug development therefore tends to rely on a reductionist, hypothesis-driven approach that narrows the focus to individual cell types or pathways. Focused assays often based on partial information or informed by animal models that never perfectly reflect human disease then attempt to identify single molecules that will benefit patients.