Mylan is set for focusing on a new generation of solutions capable of delivering better health for the people. With this aim, it recently concluded a dual health Hackathon event at Pittsburgh, US and Bengaluru providing a platform for professionals and students to collaborate with the global pharma major to develop solutions that address real-world health challenges.
The event organised at the Global Center in Bengaluru attracted 125 participants comprising 30 teams who worked for around 18 hours to build solutions to overcome obstacles in HIV treatment, leverage existing technology to increase access to healthcare, besides develop public datasets and application programming interfaces to build insights about diseases.
“We have an ambitious objective to set new standards in healthcare and provide the world’s 7 billion population access to high quality medicines. In order to provide this, we have to think differently. This is where we are now one of the few pharmaceutical companies globally to host hackathon competitions,” Dustin Updyke, senior innovative projects engineer, Mylan told Pharmabiz in an email.
Since 2014, Mylan hosted the Hackathon in Pittsburgh. The company has a presence in India from 2007 which accounts for nearly half of its workforce and more than half of its manufacturing facilities.
Even as GE Healthcare organises a Hackathon to tap novel concepts for novel medical device designs, this is the first in India for Mylan. We are not aware of any other pharmaceutical company that has organised such an event in India, he said.
The competition under two categories for IT professionals and students awarded cash prizes to the winners. Under the professional catergory, NTT Hackers representing NTTi3, California, were the winners under the professional category. They leveraged social media, public datasets and the cloud to identify and record patients’ adverse effects to medication. The two runners up were Team BangOn Hackathon which developed a mobile solution on treatment options for HIV and Team THEA which devised a multilingual chat application on patient information about diseases, treatments, drug usage and adverse event reporting.
Under the student category, Team bitmap from the International Institute of Information Technology(IIIT) Bengaluru bagged the first place for a geographical monitoring solution to detect adverse drug reactions based on social network data streams. It also extrapolated findings to recommend supply chain adjustments to ensure medicines are delivered to the regions that need it most, said Updyke.
The runners-up Team Traceback from PES University (PESU) developed a geospatial-temporal prediction engine to model the spread of diseases using public health information and unconventional data sources, such as social media and news agencies.