Meet the EHDEN partners - David van Brunt

Introduce yourself and AbbVie?

AbbVie is a global, research and development-based biopharmaceutical company committed to developing innovative advanced therapies for some of the world's most complex and critical conditions. The company's Mission is to use its expertise, dedicated people and a unique approach to innovation to markedly improve treatments across four primary therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, virology and neuroscience. In more than 75 countries, AbbVie employees are working every day to advance health solutions for people around the world.

I am the founder and head of the Division of Evidence and Analytics within AbbVie’s Health Economics and Outcomes Research function, based in Chicago. My teams interface with the HEOR therapeutic area teams and other functions to enable the maximal benefit from real-world data and the patient perspective. We work to ensure that our stakeholders have timely, relevant, and fit-for-purpose real-world evidence to inform their decisions. These stakeholders include patients, providers, payers and society as whole, as well as colleagues within AbbVie as we make decisions through the product development lifecycle.

What is your role in EHDEN and what do you personally hope to get out of this role?

I’m the AbbVie PI and sponsor for EHDEN. As such, I pull together the different experts from around the company to ensure we can contribute to the various work packages. I am most excited about the possibility of enabling fast access and analysis of real-world data across diverse healthcare systems, using data that have much longer follow-up times than we typically see in our US healthcare systems’ databases.

What would you consider success at the end of EHDEN?

A one-stop shop enabling research with real-world data representing Europe. Doing so with the common data model and open source tools will really allow for the speed, transparency, replicability and relevance that we need for a data-driven future.