Innoplexus launches new Blockchain platform for Pharma innovation

If your loved one was diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness, wouldn’t you want all the information possible to be available to those who could formulate a targeted treatment?

Of course you would. And that’s precisely what inspired Gunjan Bhardwaj to found Innoplexus, with the aim of bringing more sophisticated machine learning and AI to healthcare.

When Bhardwaj witnessed a friend and mentor undergo treatment for cancer, he was astounded at the dearth of information available that could have helped form an acute, targeted treatment plan. As a former consultant at Ernst and Young and Boston Consulting Group, Bhardwaj’s firsthand experience left him seeking a better way. The result was Innoplexus, which was born out of the need to help those who find themselves searching for effective treatment options through readily available information stores.

“More sharing of insights and data means more creative research, more successful clinical trials, and faster innovation. The end result is more effective, less expensive drugs for consumers,” Bhardwaj said.

Accelerating the Pace of Innovation

Since 2011, Innoplexus has sought to close the gap between the consulting and technological paradigms for healthcare uses. In doing so, they’ve established themselves as the premier AI and Big Data innovator for pharmaceutical companies. Now, they’re pushing the envelope even further by debuting a new blockchain-based platform to solve one of the biggest problems in drug development: the loss of data from failed experiments.

Publication bias heavily skews the information available to medical professionals. Typically, only breakthroughs are published and data from failed pharma research experiments often does not enter into the public sphere. This represents a massive inefficiency in the field, as experiments can be conducted even though, based on previously failed iterations, they are doomed to produce no significant results.

Innoplexus is hoping to minimize these inefficiencies and redundancies, which cost valuable time and funding, with their iPlexus platform. The platform will provide a secure, blockchain-based forum upon which both published and unpublished research is readily searchable. Immutable timestamps will ensure the protection of IP, and AI will continually analyze uploaded data to cater information to ongoing drug development research. This AI system will also evaluate the originality of uploaded data, giving the most original findings greater weight within the system and pricing the information accordingly for sharing and licensing.

This system aims to provide an invaluable shortcut to the often cumbersome peer-review process, which is fallible and time-consuming. In addition to traditional processes being subject to publishing bias that often precludes failed experiments, it can also take four to five months for a researcher to have even their successful findings published. By allowing researchers to upload their findings—both failed and successful—to the iPlexus platform in real time, duplicate studies will be reduced substantially.

“So many useful insights get lost when data from failed experiments goes unreported. By giving researchers a secure platform to share these insights, we will cut back on duplicative work and accelerate the pace of innovation,” said Bhardwaj.

Impacts of the Platform

The iPlexus system has obvious impacts for researchers, and those benefits are expected to cast an even wider net within the healthcare system. Clinical trials, freed from the insanity of conducting an already-failed study, can be reasonably expected to display higher rates of success. In turn, this heightened efficiency in the clinical stage will result in more streamlined R&D processes overall. The decrease in R&D costs will ultimately be reflected in drug costs. Additionally, we can anticipate a wider array of innovative drugs that arise from more intelligently conceived and targeted clinical trials.

“Innoplexus has always been about driving innovation for the benefit of the patient. AI, blockchain, and other technologies are only valuable insofar as they solve real problems, and in pharma, solving these problems often means saving lives,” Bhardwaj added.

Humans are often said to learn more from their failures than their successes. With their updated iPlexus platform, Innoplexus is seeking to reflect that truism in the way medical professionals conduct clinical trials and research.

The original article was published on Techbullion.

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