(New York, NY – November 17, 2014) – Galileo Analytics Co-Founder Anna McCollister-Slipp today called on pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration to find ways to incorporate new forms of patient-generated health data into clinical trials. McCollister-Slipp made her remarks as part of a panel on patient-generated health data at this year’s Partnering for Cures conference in New York, sponsored by Faster Cures and the Milken Institute.

McCollister-Slipp was among a select group of genomics experts, researchers and technology developers discussing the promise of new digital health and genomic data sources for transforming clinical research, as well as the barriers to including new, innovative patient-generated data streams into clinical research.

Panel members included:

  • Eric Green, Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health
  • Anna McCollister-Slipp, Co-Founder, Galileo Analytics
  • Tom Parsons, Co-Founder, HealthXL
  • Eric Schadt, Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences, and the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai
  • Ravi Seshadri, Vice President, Technology, NantHealth
  • Todd Sherer, CEO, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (moderator)

McCollister-Slipp appealed to Pharmaceutical and medical device researches to bring patients into the process of designing research protocols, which she says might help increase the patient participation in clinical research.

Referencing a clinical trial for a new diabetes drug in which she participated in 2013, she said “Everything about the trial process was designed for the convenience of everybody in the study process but the patients. Despite the fact that one of the big buzzwords in recent years is patient-centeredness, It was painfully obvious that the protocol designers had never consulted anybody who had lived with the disease.”

For a full video and more coverage of the panel click here.