British and Chinese medical institutions to co-develop

British pharmaceutical company GSK announced on Wednesday it will form a strategic partnership with Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases (GIRD).

The strategic collaboration will focus on respiratory disease management system, including athma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), said GSK.

According to the company, a health big data system will be developed through information sharing and covering different levels of healthcare organizations and reimbursement systems.

Real world evidence (RWE) and payment evidence will be generated and provided to relative authorities for the support of health and reimbursement policy making, streamlining of clinical path management, and effective development of hierarchical medical system, said the company.

The strategic collaboration includes a prospective COPD registry study and "New Breath, Constant Care" China Asthma Patient Management Project.

The COPD registry study will cover 5,000 patients and establish an in-depth understanding of COPD disease characteristics, disease evolution, disease management, as well as evolvement of the treatment paradigm.

The registry will also be able to measure COPD disease burden, and predict disease outcome in China. This could further help inform the future COPD disease management strategy in China.

"New Breath, Constant Care" China Asthma Patient Management Project will lead hospitals of different levels across China to set up a national asthma management collaboration network and build a digital asthma management platform, a patient database and management tools based upon APPs.

The project aims at establishing and improving asthma disease management result through more standardized clinic information and pathways, better doctor/patient communication and long-term big data analysis.

It is estimated that the project will cover at least 60,000 asthma patients in regular management in three years.

Prof Rongchang Chen, head of GIRD, said that through partnership with leading multi-national pharma companies like GSK, "we would fully leverage the new study concept and transformation of medical science to change the traditional model of diagnosis and treatment."

"The grassroots patients will benefit from advanced options of diagnosis and treatment, and academic evidence will be provided to support the policies of health and reimbursement, as well as personalized treatment strategies which will fit grassroots healthcare," said Chen.

Thomas Willemsen, general manager of GSK China Pharma and Vaccines, said:" Through this partnership with GIRD we hope to help generate valuable data to improve patients' health across all regions of China. Importantly, we hope it can make a contribution to the process of improving grassroots health capabilities and a tiered-healthcare system."

"Furthermore as a multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in the U.K., we hope this project can be an important highlight in UK-China people-to-people cooperation promoting joint scientific collaboration," Willemsen added.

Respiratory diseases are recognized by the World Health Organization as one of the four major diseases affecting people's health.