Novartis Malaysia’s AXON is awarded the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards for Medical Technology under the Pharmaceuticals category.

The global healthcare company provides a transformative innovation that helps predict patients’ outcomes who have undergone post-percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Swiss based pharmaceutical company Novartis Malaysia has won the Medical Technology in the Pharmaceuticals category award for its innovation AXON - a real-time and fully digitalised platform fueled with analytical insights that enables the optimisation of individualised disease management - at the recently concluded Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022.

Now in its 4th year, the awards program lauds outstanding companies that make exceptional contributions in pursuit of technological excellence.

In Malaysia, coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of death at 17% of the medically certified deaths in 2020 for both females and males across all ethnicities in Malaysia and this number is increasing. One of the most frequent procedures performed to treat complex coronary artery blockages with unstable angina and heart attack is percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). This procedure is also known as balloon angioplasty. 

Committed to reimagining medicine to improve and extend people’s lives, Novartis Malaysia collaborated with Cardiologists from Malaysia’s leading Cardiovascular Centre to develop AXON. This is the first machine learning-driven application developed in Malaysia that can predict cardiac events for heart disease patients after a percutaneous coronary intervention procedure. 

AXON is built on real-time patient data that allows physicians to analyse a patient’s true disease state. The back-end operating system trains the machine learning models effectively with good discrimination power and high prediction accuracy by democratising artificial intelligence to forecast the likelihood of a patient experiencing life-threatening clinical outcomes. It also allows Cardiovascular Specialists to screen-out high-risk patients on time and provide necessary intervention at a much earlier stage. Consequently, this may help improve patients’ quality of life and survival outcomes.

In contrast to most conventional predictive models that only incorporate single-episode baseline information, AXON is a fully integrated platform that incorporates a steady stream of future data to improve the up-to-date model’s performance and its relevance over time. It can integrate a large set of retrospective patient’s electronic medical records, and also fused with prospective data.

Currently, AXON is used in coronary artery disease, but this proven methodology and learning can be transferred to other disease areas or indications such as diabetes and hence could reduce the healthcare resource utilisation burden on a much larger scale.

“This award reaffirms Novartis’ commitment to use innovative science and digital technologies to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives in areas of great medical need. Only by working together with healthcare professionals and patients, we can change the practice of medicine,” said Akhil Kapoor, Head of Novartis Global Service Centre Kuala Lumpur, while speaking about this achievement. 

AXON has made an impact and enabled patients to receive optimal clinical care and management. This pilot project is a testament to Novartis’ commitment to reimagine medicine, delivering long-term value to physicians and patients by embedding environmental, social, and governance topics into their business operations.