PatientsLikeMe ™

UCB and PatientsLikeMe Partner to Give People With Epilepsy a Voice in Advancing Research

Biopharma company UCB and PatientsLikeMe have formed strategic partnership to create a free online, open epilepsy community that captures real-world experiences of people living with epilepsy in the U.S.

UCB is the first pharmaceutical company to partner with PatientsLikeMe to launch a patient community. Focused on learning from patients' real-world experiences, the online community allows members to create profiles that record and share their treatments, symptoms, as well as seizure type, frequency and severity.

To better understand the impact of medications that treat epilepsy in the real world, PatientsLikeMe and UCB are also taking the lead in implementing a drug safety program within this patient community. The program is designed to capture and report adverse events associated with approved UCB epilepsy therapies to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"UCB has a longstanding commitment to improving the lives of people living with severe conditions," said Roch Doliveux, chief executive officer, UCB. "This partnership is exciting because for the first time, patients will be able to contribute their experiences and real-world data to ongoing epilepsy research."

"As a patient-centered company, we are constantly seeking innovative ways to enhance and adjust our approaches to meet patient needs," says Iris Loew-Friedrich, Executive Vice-President, Chief Medical Officer, UCB. "We believe this community will be a source of information that will allow us to better understand people living with epilepsy and may help us design clinical programs that incorporate real-world patient needs and experiences in a measurable way."