On Jun. 24, 2020, Oncotelic, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mateon Therapeutics, announced that IBM has granted access to its IBM Clinical Development (ICD) platform free of charge for the clinical trial evaluating the potential of Mateon’s lead drug candidate OT-101 in COVID-19 patients.

The award was made following IBM’s review of the program and is designed to help accelerate the upcoming phase II COVID-19 clinical trial. IBM is supporting COVID-19 clinical research through an initiative to help support trial sponsors with promising therapeutic and vaccine candidates.

The ICD platform offering from IBM Watson Health is a cloud-based, end-to-end clinical development system used by leading CROs and designed to reduce the time and cost of clinical trials. ICD solutions include electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO), data integration, reporting and analytics, quality and compliance, medical coding, endpoint analysis, randomization, and clinical trial supply management. Remote monitoring of patients is possible through the system’s ePRO technology, which could become crucial in rapidly completing clinical studies as new “hot-spots” of infection arise across the globe.