Innovating for Patients

Patients fuel our passion to create new approaches that help advance the standards of care for diseases with high unmet needs.

Going beyond "good enough" to make a difference

At the heart of AbbVie's unrelenting drive for innovation are the patients we serve. That's why our investment in R&D is so critical. Our teams of scientists use novel approaches to help deliver therapies and solutions for conditions with the greatest unmet need.

Through patient-focused drug development, we empower patient voices to be heard and help guide our decision-making process to advance cutting-edge science.

KEY AREAS OF FOCUS

How we innovate for patients:


Partnering to advance drug development

We partner with patients, patient organizations, caregivers and clinicians to ensure that individual experiences, perspectives, needs and priorities are part of the clinical development process. For example, our approach to Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) is grounded in collaborations with key stakeholders to understand patients' lived experiences, allowing us to develop strategies and solutions to help patients thrive.


Diversifying our clinical trials

We believe clinical trials should reflect the populations we serve. Led by our dedicated Clinical Trial Diversity & Inclusion team, we work to design inclusive study protocols, enable under-represented populations to volunteer and continuously evaluate our clinical trial eligibility criteria against real-world datasets — so that all patients can have their voices heard. To learn more, read about our commitment to racial justice.


Embedding the patient experience

We work to better understand the experience of people living with a disease or condition, integrating their perspectives throughout our clinical development process to meet their specialized health needs. We develop robust patient journey maps to understand the transactional and emotional journey people experience from diagnosis through treatment and beyond.


Advancing digital health technologies

From wearables to gaming platforms that measure disease symptoms and treatment outcomes, we're deploying digital health technology (DHT) tools that enable unprecedented data gathering and insights that inform our drug development process.

For diseases that are challenging to develop new therapies, our new tools help enable the development of objective and sensitive digital biomarkers — which aim to improve our ability to identify treatment responders faster and make clinical assessments more precise.

We also measure some outcomes in the real-world setting through connected sensor technology alongside COAs to provide a holistic understanding of patient experience. For example, we measure improvements in physical activity, sleep, and joint range of motion upon treatment in rheumatic conditions. In dermatological indications, images can be captured and assessed in real-time, enabling evidence-based treatment discussions based on disease activity.


Unlocking the potential of Real-World Evidence (RWE)

RWE is clinical data derived from real patients during their real lives, which has the potential to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how a new therapeutic option will work by complementing the findings of traditional randomized clinical trials.

RWE helps us understand disease burden, treatment patterns, patient behaviors and unmet needs, and treatment performance — particularly populations with disparities in care and outcomes — that cannot be studied through traditional clinical trials.

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