By Youbean Oak, Bill Woywod, and Paige Cooper, Guidehouse
For life sciences companies struggling to find crucial insights into rare diseases, the internet offers a trove of public data to tap into to learn more. As many as 7,000 rare conditions together affect an estimated 25 to 30 million Americans in total. While breakthroughs for novel therapies offer a promising way to shift the macabre trajectory of some life-threatening rare diseases, many more await remedies. The small, often dispersed populations make studying them, developing treatments, and recruiting for clinical trials extremely difficult.