Datavant, a leading health data platform company, announced today it has signed an agreement to acquire Aetion, a prominent real-world evidence (RWE) platform. The strategic combination aims to deliver an end-to-end RWE platform that will enable healthcare and life sciences companies to more efficiently generate actionable insights about therapeutic effectiveness throughout the product lifecycle.
The acquisition brings together Datavant's industry-standard platform for secure, compliant health data exchange with Aetion's expertise in developing decision-grade evidence plans and analyses. The combined capabilities will support evidence generation from clinical trials through post-market treatment, addressing a growing demand for comprehensive, longitudinal patient health data.
Strategic Rationale and Market Impact
"As Datavant has grown and scaled, our life sciences and ecosystem partners have been asking us for a deeper capability set to bring together disparate data sources so they can tap into a more comprehensive and longitudinal view of patient health across the product lifecycle," said Kyle Armbrester, Chief Executive Officer of Datavant.
The complementary combination unites two industry leaders in making real-world evidence truly actionable, covering the full spectrum of services needed to deliver scientifically validated, transparent, and reproducible RWE accepted by global regulators, including the FDA and EMA.
Jeremy Rassen, ScD, CEO of Aetion, emphasized the alignment of their missions: "By joining forces with Datavant, we'll unlock the full potential of real-world evidence to advance confident, data-driven decisions that improve patient care. Today, we are taking a bold step toward realizing our shared vision: a world where health data is seamlessly connected and actionable—so we can answer what treatments work, for whom, and what they should cost."
Enhanced Technical Capabilities
The acquisition coincides with two significant product launches that highlight the technical synergies between the companies:
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Datavant Connect powered by AWS Clean Rooms - An enhanced capability that facilitates cloud-first data discovery and evaluation to accelerate time to insight. Through this platform, ecosystem partners' data becomes more easily accessible and can be combined with complementary data sources.
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Aetion® Activate - A new software offering that expands Aetion's portfolio to better serve biostatisticians and data scientists. It creates a collaborative, auditable, and secure platform for both code and no-code users while removing the burdens of manual data preparation.
Aetion's technology will enhance Datavant Connect's data discovery features, improve privacy assessments, and provide end-customers with clean datasets and analytics they can leverage for a range of uses. Additionally, the Aetion Evidence Platform is now available in AWS Marketplace, further expanding its accessibility.
Expanded Data Ecosystem
Upon closing, Datavant and Aetion will have a combined ecosystem of over 300 data partners. Datavant's real-world data (RWD) partners comprise datasets across electronic health records, claims, specialty pharmacy, registries, imaging, lab, social determinants of health, and more.
With this acquisition, RWD partners across the Datavant ecosystem will gain improved visibility of their data's utility through sharper querying capabilities, scaling value, demand, and additional use cases across a more expansive base of life sciences companies.
Integration Focus
The companies will focus on leveraging their complementary capabilities to create an end-to-end offering on data discovery, linkage, privacy, curation, and advanced analysis. This integration will enable their ecosystem and life sciences partners to create analytics-ready insights more efficiently.
Armbrester noted that "The addition of Aetion's team of scientists and technologists further bolsters our complementary capabilities and expertise so we can better leverage data from our ecosystem of partners to support efforts before, during, and after commercialization - generating evidence from trial to treatment and beyond to deliver life-improving therapies."
Industry Context
The acquisition comes at a time when real-world evidence is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare decision-making. Regulatory bodies, including the FDA and EMA, are placing greater emphasis on RWE for both regulatory submissions and post-approval monitoring.
By combining Datavant's connectivity and tokenization capabilities with Aetion's advanced analytics, the merged entity will be well-positioned to address the growing demand for robust, scientifically valid real-world evidence that can inform critical healthcare decisions across the entire product lifecycle.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in the announcement. The transaction is expected to close pending customary regulatory approvals.
