If you’re having trouble keeping up with multiple industry programs aimed at COVID-19, you’re not alone. But, there is a new solution that can help you see the proverbial forest from the trees – Signals Analytics COVID-19 Playbook.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with multiple industry programs aimed at COVID-19, you’re not alone. But, there is a new solution that can help you see the proverbial forest from the trees – Signals Analytics’ COVID-19 Playbook.
The online COVID-19 Playbook is an analytics platform that uses external data that uncover trends and predictive insights. The COVID-19 Playbook is a front-end user interface of the Signals Analytics platform and connects data from a wide range of sources including clinical trials, research papers, business events, announcements, media coverage, drug developments and more. Context is extracted from the various data types and visualizations and actionable insights are generated, Signals Analytics said in its announcement. The COVID-19 Playbook includes dashboards such as Drug Pipeline Overview, a COVID-19 Target and Modality Landscape, and Research Paper Assessment. In addition, users can set manual alerts through a section dubbed “Findings” that will send updates once per week.
Shlomi Madar, vice president of Healthcare Solutions for Signals Analytics, told BioSpace in an interview that the platform takes a deep dive into the trends and the drug and vaccine development the industry has mounted against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The platform, which was initially put together over the matter of a few days and is updated regularly, offers a look at trending drug and vaccine development across the industry, as well as plans by companies to repurpose drugs as a potential treatment of COVID-19.
Madar, who spoke to BioSpace from his home in New Jersey during the height of the pandemic in that area, noted that the onsite platform provides a “full picture” of the industry response to the epidemic. In addition to information about different drug and vaccine candidates, the COVID-19 Playbook also includes research papers, clinical trials and business events, Madar said.
The Signals Analytics dashboard links to the publications from the organizations about the research on various programs aimed at the disease and provides the details to user organizations that can help them determine whether or not they should devote resources to these areas. Some drugs that are considered to show promise in treating the pandemic such as Gilead Science’s remdesivir, as well as longtime malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, are highlighted in the playbook. Madar also pointed to some vaccine programs, such as Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidate. Madar said no vaccine such as this candidate has received regulatory approval and called the approach “very interesting.”
The COVID-19 Playbook is similar in structure to other dashboard platforms Signals Analytics has developed over the years. It is open to researchers and others who are looking to monitor vaccines that are in development for COVID-19 and other strains of coronavirus, monitor trending drugs that are being tested for COVID-19 and assess which drugs are being repurposed to help treat infected people.
“The Signals Analytics platform on the other hand is designed to surface trends and actionable insights across a wide range of data sets to alleviate the burden researchers and analysts face as they look for clues that will speed up vaccine development and identify effective treatments. In the middle of this pandemic, every minute counts.
“We are proud to offer our COVID-19 Playbook to industry leaders, non-profits and government agencies to turn a very labor-intensive process filled with risk and uncertainty into something actionable and relevant that will speed up the end to this scourge,” Signals Analytics Chief Executive Officer Gil Sadeh said in a statement.
As more research is done into COVID-19 vaccines and drug development, the data gets more time-consuming to sift through. The simple elegance of the playbook is the ease with which people can navigate the disease landscape. As the playbook shows, in February, there were 200 papers published on the disease. That number has grown exponentially. In the first week of March, 500 papers were published, the playbook shows. To separate the “important data… from the noise” the playbook simplifies the process, Signals Analytics said.
“It provides a full picture of what’s being done to address the pandemic,” Madar said, adding that “everything is happening so fast.”
