Bringing a new drug to market can cost billions of dollars and take over a decade. Accelerating drug development could lead to improved patient outcomes and new discoveries, but data collecting and collaboration are difficult due to privacy concerns.
UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) Associate Professor Trinabh Gupta has a solution. In 2024, he and collaborators founded DataUnite to give researchers access to real-world health data without compromising patient privacy. DataUnite’s novel platform lets hospitals and biopharma companies query data inside existing systems, without copying or transferring it. By leveraging real-world patient data, the company can provide insights into market opportunities, unmet needs, safety, efficacy, and the value of current products. These insights can be derived from data collected in routine clinical care. Gathering data while respecting patient privacy presented a challenge, but DataUnite was able to overcome it with its virtual pooling solution. Virtual pooling allows clinical data scientists to get aggregate-level insights from multi-hospital data, without requiring any data sharing or data transfers, dramatically reducing the time and effort required to get insights from data. This has the potential to cut the time and cost of clinical trials by up to 50%.
The company hopes to bridge the gap between the biopharma and healthcare industries, leading to faster clinical trials and innovative research. To get a jumpstart, Professor Gupta is currently taking a leave of absence from UCSB to create new partnerships. DataUnite is currently partnering with multiple hospital systems, as well as pharmaceutical companies.