Target RWE Acquires NoviSci, Gains Amgen Investment

Target RWE, a clinical data company based in Durham, didn’t have to go far to find a strategic partner to boost its analytical prowess.

The company has acquired NoviSci, a software analysis and services company located in downtown Durham, seven miles away, while also scoring an investment in the newly combined company from California biotech pioneer Amgen.

“With the addition of NoviSci’s novel analytics platform and experienced team, Target provides a highly adaptive environment to accelerate insights and reproducible research output from real-world data to various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, including our pharmaceutical industry partners, healthcare investigator partners, government agencies and payor organizations,” Neal Bibeau, chief executive officer of Target RWE, said in a news release.

The acquisition will broaden Target RWE’s data analytics capabilities and enable it to meet increasing demand by pharmaceutical and biotech companies for high-quality evidence from real-world data, the company said.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Amgen Ventures, an investor in NoviSci, has made an investment in the combined company to fuel growth, joining existing Target RWE investors Norwest Venture Partners and 22C Capital. Amgen Ventures is Amgen’s corporate venture capital fund dedicated to helping emerging biotechnology companies develop human therapeutics. 

Improving health outcomes

NoviSci applies causal inference techniques from the fields of epidemiology and statistics to visualize and analyze real-world health data for partners in research and industry.

Aaron McKethan, co-founder and CEO of NoviSci said, “Our goal is to make it easier and faster to answer important questions in health care that result in better outcomes for people and populations. We have sought to use technology to bring the craft of scientific expertise to greater scale, particularly as research methods and data sources have become more complex.”

The acquisition “further validates the importance of real-world data on a global scale and the differentiated capabilities and solutions that Target RWE and NoviSci offer together,” according to Target.

“Now more than ever, real-world evidence solutions are transforming healthcare,” said Michael W. Fried, M.D., FAASLD, chief medical officer and co-founder of Target RWE. “Our expanding longitudinal, observational data augmented with new sources of data allow for deep characterization of patient journeys across a broad range of diseases and treatments.”

NoviSci previously received seed investment from Amgen Ventures and Durham-based Hatteras Venture Partners. NoviSci’s founders and leaders continue to hold faculty appointments, including at the Duke University School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

M. Alan Brookhart, Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientist of NoviSci and professor of population health sciences at Duke, said, “We are delighted to have the opportunity to apply our analytic technology to Target RWE’s unique data assets and to provide timely, relevant, and useful answers to important questions posed by stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem.”

Target RWE is a health evidence solutions company focused on generating real-world evidence (RWE) and delivering regulatory-grade data to partners to advance clinical, medical and commercial outcomes as well as to improve patient health guidelines and quality of care. The company, founded in 2015, was previously known as Target PharmaSolutions but was renamed in August 2020 to reflect its focus on real-world evidence.

The company aggregates and analyzes data from a large network of participating academic and community sites across the United States, Europe and other non-U.S. locations. Its data sets are aggregated from registries, electronic medical records, patient outcomes measures, biospecimen analyses and claims databases.

Target RWE is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, 22C Capital and other strategic investors.

Barry Teater, NCBiotech Writer
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