Novartis and Kaiku Health's (Kaiku) partnership to develop digital patient monitoring and management for patients with melanoma is being expanded to provide improved cancer care to more patients across multiple indications, following the reported success of the year-old collaboration.

In the first phase of the original partnership, which was announced in April 2021, the two companies developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib) combination targeted therapies for adjuvant, unresectable or metastatic melanoma with BRAF mutation.

The collaboration hopes to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting and develop more advanced machine learning-based algorithms, such as symptom prediction, to help provide patients being treated with Tafinlar and Mekinist, and other BRAF and MEK combination therapies, with more personalised symptom management.

Kaiku has also been working with Roche since 2019, and the companies extended the digital monitoring and management partnership (DPMM) in May this year to further develop the DPMM tools to provide real-time symptom management, as well as improved patient support.

The partnership with Roche also seeks to provide further clinical evidence on the impact of digital patient monitoring on clinical outcomes through evidence generation studies.