Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Patient Engagement in R&D

More than five million people worldwide live with IBD, whose symptoms can be unpredictable, making disease management challenging.¹ Part of what fuels Takeda’s ongoing dedication to advanced research in the field of IBD is our deep understanding of the challenges that dictate the unique needs for both people living with IBD and the physicians who treat them. Through ongoing partnerships and research, we are taking a closer look at the patient experience from various perspectives and working to provide tools for better disease management.

People living with IBD are experts on living with their disease, and at Takeda, we believe we can learn from them to improve our research. We are partnering with experts and thinkers across different disciplines to integrate the patient perspective into our research even better. By engaging patients throughout the development lifecycle, we are shifting from developing medicines for patients to developing medicines with patients. Our strategy for engaging patients in the research process focuses on three pillars: a culture of novel partnerships, research, and clinical development. 

Recently, Takeda partnered with PatientsLikeMe (PLM), an online patient community, to build a deeper understanding of how people experience and think about their illness, including IBD. More than 500,000 patients use PLM to talk about their conditions, track their symptoms, and share information – the community has 38 million data points on more than 2,700 illnesses.

With this partnership, PLM and Takeda are pioneering how to add the patient voice to the drug development process. The data from PLM will help research teams better identify and understand unmet patient needs and integrate them into the design of clinical trials. By incorporating patient preferences into clinical trials, we can ensure our products better address patient needs and improve quality of life.