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November 29, 2023

Pangaea Data builds novel AI with Azure to foster collaboration and improve patient outcomes while saving UK NHS £1 billion

Pangaea Data offers a product platform that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and medical guidelines to characterize patients across 7,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions. The platform mimics the manual review process used by clinicians within the context of the whole patient record—not just symptoms and keywords—without transacting patient data. This empowers clinicians in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries to find and connect to more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and miscoded patients across hard-to-diagnose conditions for monitoring, screening, therapies, and trials. Using this approach improves patient outcomes in a financially sustainable, scalable, and privacy-preserving manner, fostering mutually beneficial collaborations between both industries.

Pangaea Data

Patient privacy is a top requirement for any healthcare product or solution. The Pangaea Data team knew they would need a cloud-based platform that could also meet the rigorous security and privacy requirements of the healthcare industry. Based on this criteria, they chose Microsoft Azure for platform development, testing, and deployment. Microsoft Defender for Cloud was selected to ensure the new product met the industry’s security and compliance requirements. Pangaea Data also opted to use the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data standard in Azure Health Data Services to standardize and handle complex patient records.

“Early identification of cancer cachexia remains a challenge, but the earlier it is identified, the quicker we can start treatment to prevent or treat cachexia. Pangaea is helping to fill this gap by providing software that successfully extracts this information from unstructured text available in the electronic health record.”

Dr. Barry Laird and Richard Skipworth, (joint statement), Caledonian Cachexia Collaborative

Cachexia is a highly prevalent and life-threatening muscle-wasting condition that affects up to 80 percent of cancer patients, contributing to an estimated 22 percent to 30 percent of cancer-related deaths. Early detection and treatment of cachexia can make a tremendous difference in the quality of life of cancer patients and potentially extend their lives. However, up to 50 percent of cachectic symptoms go unnoticed1 due to inconsistent or ineffective screening practices.2

Left untreated, cachexia can cause significant deterioration that requires more complex and expensive treatments, placing significant burdens on healthcare systems. Delayed diagnosis may also prevent patients from receiving approved therapies or participating in clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies.

The key to overcoming these challenges hinges on the discovery of more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and miscoded patients and ensuring they are directed onto the appropriate clinical care pathway in a timely manner. Pangaea Data has developed a product platform to help achieve this goal. Pharmaceutical and healthcare professionals can use the platform to find and connect to more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and miscoded patients across 7,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions (including cachexia) for monitoring, screening, therapies, and trials. Using this approach has been proven to improve patient outcomes in a financially sustainable, scalable, and privacy-preserving manner.

Improving outcomes, saving billions, and expanding patient reach

Symptoms of Cachexia, such as weight loss, low-body mass index (BMI), and sarcopenia, are common across multiple conditions, making it difficult to diagnose cachexia in its early stages. However, Pangaea Data’s product platform is designed to work across heterogeneous datasets and distinguish between conditions with overlapping features. This enables Pangaea Data to find more patients who would otherwise be undiagnosed and misdiagnosed earlier.

Interested in testing Pangaea Data’s product platform capabilities, the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom collaborated with two pharmaceutical companies from the United States and Japan to find more cachectic cancer patients earlier for screening, trials, and commercial therapies. 

For the test, NHS clinicians applied Pangaea Data’s product platform to a dataset of 8,483 patients who had previously been evaluated using traditional resources such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or symptom-based searches. The result: Pangaea Data’s product platform correctly identified the 41 known cachexia patients plus an additional 253 patients that were not identified using ICD or symptom-based searches. 

The earlier discovery of these patients helped halve the cost of treatment from £10,000 to £5,000 per patient, translating to an annual saving of £1 billion for the NHS in the context of discovering 200,000 such patients who are missed in the UK annually. In addition, it has also improved patient outcomes and justified the allocation of healthcare resources, such as nutritionists, with empirical evidence. This enabled healthcare providers to deliver quality care for a larger patient population more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Barry Laird and Richard Skipworth of the Caledonian Cachexia Collaborative had this to say in a joint statement:3 “Early identification of cancer cachexia remains a challenge, but the earlier it is identified, the quicker we can start treatment to prevent or treat cachexia. Pangaea is helping to fill this gap by providing software that successfully extracts this information from unstructured text available in the electronic health record.” 

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical sponsors also benefitted from the discovery of these patients through a six-times-larger pool of potentially suitable patients for their therapies and trials. This, in turn, boosts revenues and helps accelerate treatment development through enhanced research translatability to real-world clinical practice.

Figure 1.

 Pangaea Data’s product enabled sustainable collaboration between the UK’s NHS and two global pharmaceutical companies to discover 6x more undiagnosed and miscoded cachectic cancer patients.

Scaling to help patients around the world

Patient privacy is a top priority for any healthcare technology. Pangaea Data needed a scalable solution that could meet the rigorous security and privacy requirements of the industry. Therefore, Pangaea Data selected Microsoft Azure for its platform development, testing, and deployment, plus Microsoft Defender for Cloud to meet the industry’s security and compliance requirements. Pangaea Data also selected the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data standard in Azure Health Data Services to standardize and handle complex patient records. 

“Working with Microsoft has helped Pangaea Data connect and build trust with end users from across 140,000 healthcare and pharmaceutical providers who manage their clinical data on Azure,” says Sally Frank, Worldwide Lead for Healthcare and Life Sciences, Microsoft for Startups.

The Pangaea Data platform is deployed behind the firewall of the healthcare providers, thus assuring privacy compliance since no data is touched or moved. Patient information is only accessible by the treating clinicians at the healthcare providers who review the undiagnosed and miscoded patients through Pangaea Data’s user interface (UI) in their environment to determine the most appropriate clinical care pathway involving monitoring, clinical trial, or a therapy. Using virtual machines, container instance, app service, front door, an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template, and Azure Virtual Network allowed Pangaea Data to scale its product platform across multiple healthcare providers in a secure, compliant manner. 

Pangaea Data’s success in tackling the challenges of cancer cachexia is just one aspect of their success. The company has also demonstrated repeated and diverse success across a variety of other disease areas such as: pulmonary, renal, respiratory, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and autoimmune. Azure will continue to be a critical pillar for the scalability of Pangaea Data’s product platform, allowing the processing of larger volumes of patient data across multiple healthcare sites worldwide, while ensuring patient privacy is preserved.

“Our AI and medicine driven product platform is already delivering notable impact on the industry and helping to realize our company’s vision for precision medicine and preventative health. With Azure, we are well-equipped to scale and meet the increasing demand for our services in characterizing patients across 7,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions,” says Dr. Vibhor Gupta, CEO and Founder of Pangaea Data. “We’ve had terrific support from our Microsoft for Startups team, and the Azure Marketplace has helped raise awareness of our product platform, which will continue to contribute to improved outcomes for patients worldwide.” 

Find out more about Pangaea Data on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.

“Working with Microsoft has helped Pangaea Data connect and build trust with end users from across 140,000 healthcare and pharmaceutical providers who manage their clinical data on Azure.”

Sally Frank, Worldwide Lead for Healthcare and Life Sciences, Microsoft for Startups

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