Novartis’s AXON Technology wins Medical Technology-Pharmaceuticals award
Petaling Jaya,15 June 2022 – Leading medicines company Novartis Malaysia today won the Medical Technology – Pharmaceuticals award for its predictive tool AXON at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022.
Hosted by the Singapore Business Review, the awards are now in its fourth year of spotlighting outstanding companies that made exceptional contributions in pursuit of technological innovation.
Patrik Grande, General Manager and Country President of Novartis Malaysia and Brunei, says: “We are honoured to be recognised by Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022. AXON is part of our commitment to reimagine medicines by using innovative science and digital technologies to reimagine medicine, thereby improving and extending lives of Malaysians.”
A real-time, fully-digitized platform, AXON predicts clinical outcomes of patients within one year of undergoing a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedure – more commonly known as balloon angioplasty.
In Malaysia, coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of death for Malaysians of all genders and ethnicities, posing a huge economic disease burden impact. A common procedure to treat complex coronary artery blockages with unstable angina and heart attack is balloon angioplasty.
According to Ministry of Health, some 11,000 PCI procedures are conducted yearly in Malaysia, placing a huge burden on the country’s stressed healthcare ecosystem. The cases were recorded at the National Heart Institute (IJN) and other hospitals under the Health Ministry, including Serdang Hospital and Penang Hospital. (Health Ministry: 11,000 PCI procedures yearly, figures at serious level, n.d.).
AXON predicts
AXON can predict the likelihood of a patient experiencing life-threatening clinical outcomes, allowing cardiovascular specialists to screen high-risk patients on time and provide necessary interventions much earlier, thereby improving their quality of living and survival outcomes.
This pilot project is the first machine-learning-powered platform developed in Malaysia that can predict cardiac events for heart disease patients post-PCI.
AXON is the result of a unique collaboration between Novartis Global Service Centre Kuala Lumpur’s CONEXTS team – internal specialists, providing high-quality commercial, scientific, legal, digital and consulting services and solutions across the organisation.
This project is a research collaboration between Novartis, Malaysia’s leading cardiovascular center and renowned Cardiologists, Akhil Kapoor, Head of Novartis Global Service Centre Kuala Lumpur, says: “Novartis CONEXTS specialists worked together with healthcare professionals to deliver AXON, which has the ability to change the practice of medicine”.
“AXON harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and insights from data analytics that optimizes individualized disease management. We believe its methodology and machine learning model can be adapted to other diseases such as diabetes – prevalent in 18.3% of Malaysian adults – thus reducing the burden on the local healthcare ecosystem exponentially,” he says.
This article first appeared on @BusinessNewsMy and @LatestMalaysia