The FDA’s new CURE ID mHealth app will allow clinicians to post their own experiences in treating complex and unusual diseases, find relevant studies and collaborate with their peers across the globe.
Federal officials have unveiled an mHealth platform that will allow healthcare providers to share ideas on treating complex infectious diseases.
The CURE ID platform, unveiled this week by the US Food and Drug Administration, collects case reports from clinicians using FDA-approved drugs and allows clinicians to chat with peers and review ongoing and proposed clinical trials. The global connected health service was created by the FDA in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
“The CURE ID application focuses on drugs for infectious diseases lacking adequate treatments, including neglected tropical diseases, emerging infectious threats and infections caused by antimicrobial-resistant organisms,” Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner, said in a press release. “When health care professionals directly input their clinical cases into the app, CURE ID allows these real-world experiences to be organized and analyzed much faster, making it easier to spot promising new uses for existing drugs.”
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“Our hope is that this app will serve as a connector among major treatment centers, academics, private practitioners, government facilities and other health care professionals from around the world and ultimately get treatments to patients faster,” she added.
Developed in the US Health and Human Services’ IDEA Lab in 2015, the mHealth app was tested in India and South Africa, with additional feedback from users in the US, Europe and Peru. The current database features information on at least 325 different infectious diseases and syndromes, as well as reports from some 1,500 clinicians and published literature from 18,000 clinical trials.
The telehealth resource aims to give providers an outlet to contribute their own experiences in treating difficult diseases. It adds real-world data to the mix, giving providers the opportunity to learn from others in the field and see how treatments are or aren’t working.
“The systematic collection of real-world experience in the app will help identify drug candidates for additional study, encourage further drug development, and may serve as a resource for practitioners making individual patient treatment decisions in the absence of established safe and effective options,” the FDA said in the news release. “Repurposing approved drugs for new clinical indications can potentially offer an efficient drug-development pathway for treatments of diseases and conditions that have few or no therapeutic options.”
“The potential importance of new therapeutic opportunities from repurposing drugs can’t be understated,” added NCATS Director Christopher P. Austin, MD. “The CURE ID platform exemplifies how collaborative efforts can spark innovations that benefit patients. This new platform harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to help gather medical observations in the field and help identify potentially effective treatments for diseases.”
Source: mhealth Intelligence