Push to use big data in Japan gets help from industry, academia

The pharmaceutical industry's producers and academic researchers in Japan are actively engaged, despite setbacks experienced by others such as Google ($GOOG), in building a big-data pipeline, this one now including 10 drugmakers and 30 medical institutions.

Takeda Pharmaceutical and Kyoto University Hospital have joined the group to amass data from about 10,000 hospitals in Japan to contribute to a collaborative database to be used for further research as a way to trim the time it takes to discover and develop innovative drugs.

Multinational drugmakers, including Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK), and the institutions are collecting data such as that Takeda and KUH are collecting to pool side effects, diagnostic information and even, where available, electronic charts and other records to feed a massive database.

The plan is to tie particular drugs to particular diseases to determine which are the most efficacious in treatment, instead of the current practice of a drugmaker relying on its own information gathering, usually on its own products.

According to Nikkei, Takeda and the others in the project are charged up to about $250,000 a year for access to the data, in Takeda's case, helped by a government subsidy and help in building a collection system.

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