As the pandemic tore across the world, principal epidemiologist Oliver Blandy knew he had the expertise and data to help fight COVID-19. Get the full story.
Hunkered down in London as the COVID-19 pandemic tore across the world in the spring of 2020, Oliver Blandy found himself hoping that he would be tasked with putting his skills to work fighting the virus.
“You want to be a part of something bigger, I guess,” said Blandy, “and because it’s so current, it’s less abstract than doing epidemiology on an indication like cancer – which is important! – but COVID is happening in real time.”
Blandy serves as a principal epidemiologist on the Clarivate 40-person epidemiology team, which is spread across India, the United States and the United Kingdom. He soon got his wish, embedding with a client that was working on some promising solutions for COVID-19 treatment and prevention.
Blandy serves as a principal epidemiologist on the Clarivate 40-person epidemiology team, which is spread across India, the United States and the United Kingdom. He soon got his wish, embedding with a client that was working on some promising solutions for COVID-19 treatment and prevention.
“We have the tech and the data capabilities to bring all of the different pieces of the puzzle together.”
Vaccine and treatment developers were hurtling through R&D and commercialization processes that can take many years under normal circumstances, with the aim of bringing innovative products to market within months. As the resident epidemiologist, Blandy sat in on daily meetings, fielding vitally important questions about the makeup of patient populations, infection forecasts and patient safety. One of his first assignments: helping the client with clinical trial site selection.
“They needed to identify places where there were enough cases, but not so many that the health system was going to collapse, and the trial with it,” he said.
With more than 53,000 data points, a data-driven solution for patient safety
Blandy’s team developed a the Clarivate COVID-19 dashboard, curating reliable public and commercial data sources and conducting a massive review of the relevant medical literature.
“Within a year we identified through our search string 22,000 papers,” said Blandy. “We then did a title abstract review and reviewed about 2,500 papers, and from the thousand papers we found useful, we included 53,500 data points.”
The team piped those data points into a bespoke, dynamic data dashboard to enable different teams within the client company to view angles and vectors relevant to their work.
This dashboard helped vaccine developers quickly answer vitally important patient questions that were essential in safely bringing a vaccine to market.
“They’re looking at a variety of business questions,” said Blandy, “like: What’s the COVID journey for different types of patients? What treatments are they getting? What complications and comorbidities do they have? What are the risk factors for COVID-19, and what are the presenting symptoms? We collected over 450 different variables for this, and they could just click on the variable of interest.”
Forecasting patient needs in the fast-moving global pandemic
Blandy also helped build a global forecasting tool covering 45 countries to help pharmaceutical clients stay ahead of a fast-changing pandemic and speed desperately needed products to market.
“Sometimes they need to answer business questions based on what the disease landscape is going to look like in six weeks, or six months or a year,” said Blandy. “With COVID, it’s complicated because you have diagnosed and undiagnosed cases – particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, a large proportion of the population weren’t being tested. So we needed to find a way to calculate that total patient population, including undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases, and project that into the near future.”
United by a common cause, a global team of Clarivate experts partnered with pharmaceutical companies to fight COVID-19. The reward for their ingenuity: Life-saving vaccines brought to market in record time. Get the full story.
