Credit Suisse https://www.credit-suisse.com as part of the Healthcare Disruptive Technologies & Innovations series, recently hosted Carolyn Magill, CEO, Aetion https://aetion.com at a virtual meeting with a small group of investors.
Aetion is a healthcare analytics company delivering Real World Evidence (RWE) to manufacturers, purchasers, and regulators of medical treatments and technologies.
In addition to the Aetion platform being used for clinical trial optimization, label expansion, safety requirements, and regulatory submissions, the company’s platform is also used as part of outcomes-based contracting with payers.
Given the scientific rigor of the Aetion platform, the company is able to provide evidence of how well medications and treatments work in different patient populations, which is of increasing importance to payers and at-risk providers.
Aetion licenses their platform to customers, which includes a “baseline” set of capabilities, such as descriptive analytics (e.g., Who’s taking what drug and what’s happening to them over time). Beyond the baseline platform, Aetion also offers additional modules that customers can purchase to provide support for different groups within an organization (e.g., epidemiology group, regulatory affairs team, and therapeutic areas like oncology).
In addition, Aetion has components in the business that serve to enhance the adoption of RWE technology, the understanding of RWE, and when/how to apply it to customer’s decision-making.
Aetion grew revenues 80% Y/Y in 2020, which Ms. Magill indicated came in well above the initial projections despite COVID-related uncertainty. Aetion’s margins are in-line with other SaaS companies.
Ms. Magill sizes the TAM for Aetion at $13 bin, including $3 bin specific to outcomes-based analytics and $10 bin that is more specific to biopharma for transforming data into evidence. She notes, there is already a fair amount of spending in these areas from mid-sized and biopharma companies where epidemiologists and biostatistician teams are conducting the kinds of analyses similar to that being done on the Aetion platform.
What is increasingly known, is that existing ways of conducting these analyses are not the most efficient approaches. Further what differentiates the Aetion platform to the status quo of biopharma manufacturers using internal platforms, is Aetion’s ability to work with and analyze other datasets outside of just the biopharma company’s own/internal data.
Ms. Magill notes that Aetion is seeing a fair amount of increased receptivity from regulators with respect to using RWE. For example, 49% of FDA-approved new drug and biologic license applications included in the RWE submission in 2019 had that figure jumping to 75% in 2020.
Ms. Magill does not believe the issue at hand is the amount of data that is available. Instead, the problem is that the data is not being synthesized effectively since hospitals produce 50 petabytes of clinical data each year, yet 97% goes unused.
For more information, ask questions, or to provide feedback, or want to provide news, email Jailendra Singh at jailendra.singh@credit-suisse.com or call 212-325-8121.