Where--and what--are the illnesses accessible to drug therapy in the world?

Continuing to build on a set of epidemiology databases begun in the late 1990s, Kantar Health (New York) has announced the latest dataset, Epi Emerging Markets, for Mexico and Turkey now, and soon to include South Korea. Epi EM complements Epi BRIC, announced in 2008 (for Brazil, Russia, India and China), which in turn was an extension of the original Epi Database, which covered the US, Europe and Japan, and now has data on 190 disease indications in each of the nations covered. Kantar Health says that the databases are used by most of the major pharma companies to assess the commercial potential of drugs under development, conduct forecasting or evaluate in-line therapy revenue potential.

The Web-accessible Epi databases provide a standardized way to assess evolving drug markets, says David Robinson, VP of Epidemiology Services within the Commercial Development practice at Kantar. Staff epidemiologists review as much government data and published reports as they can obtain, and then evaluate the quality of data in each study according to a set of criteria to ensure that the data are truly representative of populations within each of the countries studied. “Our evaluation is not a formal meta-analysis of these studies, but we do use an accepted critical review process,” he says. “Every year, we are both reviewing datasets based on new studies, and expanding the list of conditions being evaluated.” The Epi EM database currently has data on 25 indications, soon to be 40; the Epi BRIC database has 90 indications.