SAVANA: Winner of Phase 2 of the H2020 SME Instrument in collaboration with RTDI

SAVANA RESEARCH, the platform dedicated to the massive reuse of Electronic Health Records (EHR) through Artificial Intelligence to improve clinical research and precision medicine, achieves with the help of RTDI more than 1 million euros of European aid within the framework of the Instrument For Plural of pyme of the European Framework Programme for R&D&I for the period 2014-2020, Horizon 2020.

This financial support will help MEDSAVANA, the developer company, to accelerate the processes of industrialization of the product and exit to international markets.

One of the most important activities during the implementation of the project will be the conducting a clinical trial in collaboration with Boheringer Ingelheim, to demonstrate the potential of natural language processing to extract data from massive amounts of Electronic Health Records.
In the last twenty years, the average return on R&D spending in the pharmaceutical industry has decreased from almost 18% to 3.7%. In addition, annual funding for biomedical research has more than doubled, while approvals of new drugs have declined by a third. There is a broad consensus that the main cause of this problem is the exhaustion of a model aimed at developing “general indications” and the need for a new model of “precision medicine”. We simply don’t know enough about the underlying disease mechanisms involved, and more research is required to develop better disease classifications, allowing for a more targeted development approach to drugs and therapies.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been used for more than ten years in most developed countries, and now gather comprehensive clinical information from millions of patients. Leveraging EHR could accelerate clinical research and improve the quality of health care.

SAVANA RESEARCH uses natural language processing to extract data from massive amounts of EHR clinical narratives. It has the following advantages aimed at making a leap in the effectiveness of clinical research:

1. It uses unidentified clinical records and ensures state-of-the-art technologies to protect data privacy.
2. It is able to decode ten times more EHR in half the time
3. It is able to identify 100 times more EHR variables;
4. And it costs 40% less.

In RTDI we have been working for several years with MEDSAVANA, accompanying them in their business development strategies, definition of product portfolio and in the achievement of this Phase 2 of SME Instrument. We will continue to work with the great human team of MEDSAVANA in order to achieve maximum commercial success and social improvement.