The Research Council of Norway recently awarded a grant to the new company NordicRWE.

NordicRWE was granted 16 million NOK for their research and development (R&D) project that will focus on applying Real-World Evidence (RWE) in different steps in the drug development process, reports Oslo Cancer Cluster.

The vision of NordicRWE

The vision of NordicRWE is to develop a research-based system for RWE that supports drug development in accordance with high regulatory demands. Observational data, epidemiologic methods of research, and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning are all part of the research base.

The funded R&D project will construct external control arms for oncology clinical trials and combine machine learning with pharmacoepidemiology for drug signal detection.

“There is a mismatch between the need to document effect and the availability and tools to analyse health data. This is what we aim to address,” says Steinar Thoresen, project leader NordicRWE.

The timing is now for RWE

In the project description to the Research Council, NordicRWE stresses that the timing is now for RWE, mainly because of precision medicine, implying advanced treatments for smaller patient groups, making health data a natural part of drug development, and evaluation of patient care.

To succeed with the research project, NordicRWE has partnered with the AI drug development division in NEC Corporation, The Cancer Registry of Norway, and the University of Oslo. The company is currently looking for new employees, it states.

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