Baltimore, MD – Pumas-AI – a new company established
by University of Maryland School of Pharmacy faculty members Vijay
Ivaturi, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy
Practice and Science
(PPS), and Joga
Gobburu, PhD, MBA, professor in PPS – is proud to announce the release
of its first cutting-edge software platform for pharmaceutical
researchers and clinicians. Known as Pharmaceutical Modeling and
Simulation (Pumas), the software was developed through a partnership
with experts at Julia Computing. Research and software development
efforts were led by Christopher Rackauckas, PhD, senior research analyst
in PPS, with input from independent contributor Joakim Nyberg, PhD, from
Uppsala, Sweden.
“The success rate for pharmaceutical innovations is approximately two
percent,” says Gobburu, who also serves as executive director of
the Center for Translational Medicine
(CTM) at the School of Pharmacy. “Pumas
software is tailored to revolutionize big data analytics in health care,
unlike those tools used in other fields. By combining the extensive
health care knowledge of our faculty and staff with the scientific
computing experts at Julia Computing, we have developed a tool that will
not only benefit business leaders working in the pharmaceutical
industry, but also those who are caring for patients on the frontline of
health care delivery.”
Pumas is the first software platform released by Pumas-AI, whose goal is
to double pharmaceutical and patient care success rates by democratizing
tools and education in the health care data analytics space. The Pumas
software platform provides a wide range of analytic capabilities for
pharmaceutical and biotechnology development, as well as therapeutic
decision making – addressing a crucial need for pharmaceutical companies
and investors, who often base their decisions on a combination of
technical, regulatory, and commercial success probabilities, all of
which the Pumas software can provide quantitatively.
“Pumas is our company’s first product specifically designed for
professionals in the pharmaceutical and health delivery sectors to
bridge this gap,” adds Gobburu. “It leverages the Julia programming
language, and combines modern artificial intelligence (AI) with
traditional mechanistic models, allowing the CTM to foster one of its
goals of enhancing real-world data (RWD) analytics through its newly
formed Health Analytics Collective (HAC).”
A comprehensive platform based on the Julia programming language, Pumas
contains multiple modules designed to meet the needs of analysts in the
pharmaceutical industry, while also working to advance therapeutic
innovation in the clinic setting. Julia was selected for its speed and
succinctness as a programming language, which produces an interface that
looks similar to R, but operates at the speed of FORTRAN. Because Pumas
is created entirely in Julia, users can make direct use of the
language’s database, statistics, and visualization functionality – all
without losing performance.
In addition, Julia is the programming language of choice for prominent
researchers at institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) who work on projects at the cutting-edge of machine
learning, as well as in differential equations research, which means
that, unlike many other tools, Pumas has the unique ability to directly
incorporate modern techniques to achieve maximal efficiency and
accuracy.
“Pumas is the first pharmaceutical modeling suite that is designed from
the ground up to use modern graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware,
parallelized stiff differential equation solvers, and allow for the
integration of machine learning with pharmacometrics,” says Rackauckas.
“We are excited to not only accelerate current workflows, but also help
users explore the new, realistic models that are enabled by this
technology.”
Pumas will be the topic of a workshop at JuliaCon
2019, the year’s biggest Julia conference
for developers, enthusiasts, and others. JuliaCon will be held at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore in Baltimore, Md., from July 23 to 26,
2019, including a full day of preconference workshops scheduled for July
22.
A preconference workshop hosted by the CTM that day will highlight the
Pumas software platform.
“At the CTM, we strive to develop point-of-care solutions for providers
and clinicians that can help individualize treatment for patients,” says
Ivaturi, who also serves as a pharmacometrician in the CTM at the
School. “The Pumas software platform will be instrumental in helping us
optimize treatments for a number of conditions and therapeutics.”
He adds, “It is going to revolutionize therapeutic decision making and
allow health care organizations to benefit from payor incentives by
demonstrating substantial improvements to successful patient care.”
Researchers and clinicians can learn more about Pumas
at www.pumas.ai.
About Pumas-AI
Pumas-AI was established by University of
Maryland School of Pharmacy faculty members: Vijay Ivaturi, PhD,
assistant professor in PPS, and Joga Gobburu, PhD, MBA, professor in PPS
and executive director of the Center for Translational Medicine at the
School. Pumas-AI’s vision is to double pharmaceutical and patient care
success by democratizing tools and education in the health care data
analytics space. Pumas is its first product developed to provide
analytic capabilities for drug/biotech development and therapeutic
decision making. It leverages the power of the Julia programming
language to combine modern AI with traditional mechanistic models to
gain massive computational efficiency.
About Center for Translational Medicine
Established in 2011, the Center for Translational Medicine
(CTM) analyzes and summarizes data from
experiments and clinical trials using quantitative disease, drug, and
trial models, with the goal of reducing the time it takes to bring a
drug to market. Its quantitative models, along with state-of-the-art
development techniques – such as adaptive and enrichment trials – are
integrated into tools that drug developers, regulatory agencies, and
other research organizations can use to guide decisions pertaining to
“go/no-go”, dosage, patient population, design, endpoint, analyses, and
therapeutics choices.
About the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy
Established in 1841, the University of Maryland School of
Pharmacy is ranked as one of the
top 10 schools of pharmacy in the United States. It is a thriving center
for professional and graduate education, pharmaceutical care, research,
and community service. It creates the future of pharmacy by pioneering
new roles for pharmacists in advanced clinical practice and conducting
cutting-edge research in drug discovery and development, comparative
effectiveness and patient-centered outcomes, and disease management.
Faculty inspire excellence in more than 800 students, residents, and
postdoctoral fellows through a contemporary curriculum, innovative
educational experiences, and strategic professional relationships.
About Julia Computing
Julia Computing was founded by the
creators of Julia. Julia is an open-source language for high-performance
scientific computing, data science, and AI developed by a community that
consists of some of the best people in these fields. It solves the long
standing two-language problem by combining the simplicity and ease of
use of dynamic languages such as Python and R with the performance of
statically typed languages such as C++ – for which its creators were
awarded the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. Julia
is now taught and used for research at hundreds of universities
worldwide, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Cornell to name a
few. Julia Computing’s mission is to develop products that make Julia
easy to use, easy to deploy and easy to scale. It does so through a
suite of products – JuliaSure, JuliaTeam and JuliaPro, which are used by
hundreds of enterprises and universities worldwide. For new users of
Julia, live and online trainings are offered through JuliaAcademy.
About Health Analytics Collective
The Health Analytics
Collective is a group
founded by the CTM, MIT, Julia Computing, and MMS Holdings that plans to
use Pumas as part of an end-to-end solution for data science and real
world evidence analytics, allowing for the ingestion, transformation,
and analysis of all data in one system. The group aims to leverage
real-world evidence, observational data that are generated during
routine clinical practice, and patient health care databases to augment
label claims and/or support new drug applications with leading-edge
software and algorithms and a
depth of regulatory and clinical experience.