Pharmaceutical trials at the heart of Apple’s ResearchKit

Apple’s new ResearchKit could turn its iPhone and Watch technologies into medical research tools primed for the pharmaceutical industries, according to a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.

Vivek Wadhwa, writing in a guest VentureBeat article, said the ResearchKit platform enabled constant monitoring of symptoms and reactions to medications.
Clinical trials were currently conducted on a “relatively small number of patients” and pharmaceutical companies “sometimes chose to ignore data that does not suit them”.
Apple’s new ResearchKit, he added, held the potential to enable clinical trials on a larger scale.
“Data that our devices gather will be used to accurately analyze what medications patients have taken, in order to determine which of them truly had a positive effect; which simply created adverse reactions and new ailments; and which did both.”
Mr Wadhwa believed this would change the way clinical trials are done.
Apple’s ResearchKit enables mobile health app developers to capture and upload data from patients with a particular disease or from clinical trial volunteers.
Announcing open source software framework earlier this year, Apple said ResearchKit would make it “easy” for researchers and developers to create apps with the power to “revolutionize medical studies”.

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Phill Allen

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Phill is an innovative thinker particularly in fluid management. His expertise lies in ensuring the seamless flow of pharmaceutical liquid logistics, whether it's optimising current processes or pioneering new approaches.

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