Verana Health Unlocks Full Cancer Journey with AI-Powered Data

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 19, 2026 – Digital health firm Verana Health today announced the launch of industry-first, end-to-end datasets for bladder and prostate cancer, a move poised to break down longstanding data silos and accelerate research into new treatments. Timed with the upcoming ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, the new offerings leverage artificial intelligence to provide researchers with an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the patient journey across multiple medical specialties.

Charting the Fragmented Path of Urologic Cancer

For patients diagnosed with bladder or prostate cancer, the path to treatment is often complex and fragmented. A patient's journey typically begins in a urology clinic for diagnosis and initial care. As the disease progresses, they may be referred to radiation oncologists and later to medical oncologists for more advanced therapies. While this multi-specialty approach is standard clinical practice, it creates significant challenges for researchers and life sciences companies.

Each specialty maintains its own records, often within different electronic health record (EHR) systems. This results in disconnected data points, creating gaps in the understanding of the complete patient experience. Key information—such as the rationale behind treatment decisions, the use of specific biomarkers to guide therapy, and real-world patient outcomes—becomes scattered and difficult to assemble into a coherent narrative. This fragmentation makes it incredibly challenging for pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers to analyze treatment patterns, identify unmet needs, or design effective clinical trials.

Verana Health's new datasets are engineered specifically to solve this problem. By integrating real-world data from both urology and oncology practices, the company provides a longitudinal view that follows the patient from their initial diagnosis through the entire continuum of care. This "specialty-spanning" approach promises to fill the visibility gaps that have historically hindered a deep understanding of how these cancers evolve and how treatments perform in the real world, outside the controlled environment of a clinical trial.

The Power of AI in Deciphering Clinical Narratives

The foundation of this new capability lies in Verana Health's sophisticated use of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). An estimated 80% of critical patient information within EHRs is locked away in unstructured formats, such as clinician's free-text notes, pathology reports, and imaging summaries. This narrative text contains a wealth of granular detail that is not captured in structured, check-box style data fields.

Verana Health, the exclusive data partner for the American Urological Association (AUA) Quality (AQUA)® Registry, applies its proprietary AI models to this vast repository of unstructured data. The AQUA Registry itself is a massive resource, containing a decade of longitudinal data from over 10 million de-identified patients. By training its clinician-informed algorithms on this data, the company can extract critical variables at scale.

For its new prostate cancer dataset, which includes over 643,000 patients, the AI can identify Gleason scores, PSA levels, and castration status directly from clinical notes. Crucially, it can also detect signs of disease progression, such as a cancer becoming metastatic, by recognizing phrases like "growing sites of metastasis on scan," even when a formal "M1" staging code is absent. Similarly, the bladder cancer dataset provides deep insights into over 50,000 patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, extracting key details like T-stage, tumor grade, and tumor response to treatment—all essential for risk stratification and understanding therapeutic effectiveness.

"The rapid therapeutic advancement in urological cancers is a reflection of the increasing incidences of both bladder and prostate cancers," said CK Wang, M.D., General Manager of Oncology and Chief Medical Officer at Verana Health, in the company's announcement. "This in turn is fueling the need for R&D by life science organizations and the need for a greater understanding of these diseases and outcomes based on longitudinal RWD."

A Strategic Merger Forges a Data Powerhouse

The creation of these comprehensive urologic-oncology datasets was significantly accelerated by Verana Health's recent merger with COTA, a company specializing in oncology real-world data. This strategic move was more than a simple acquisition; it was a fusion of complementary strengths. While Verana Health held deep, exclusive access to urology data through the AQUA Registry, COTA brought a vast network of over 30 academic medical centers and access to data from more than 10 million oncology patients.

This merger effectively bridged the gap between the urology and oncology data worlds. It provided Verana Health with the necessary scale and specialty breadth to build a truly end-to-end view of the patient journey. Academic medical centers, a key part of the COTA network, are often where patients with complex or advanced cancers receive care, making their data invaluable for understanding later-stage disease and novel treatments.

"Following the COTA merger, we have a unique opportunity to offer life science organizations a more complete view of the patient journey reflected in the complex realities of urological cancer care," stated Sujay Jadhav, CEO of Verana Health. "We're excited to make these initial datasets available to researchers working to develop new treatments and improve patient care."

This combined data power positions the company to compete directly with other major players in the real-world evidence space, such as Flatiron Health and Tempus. However, its unique selling proposition remains its unparalleled depth in urology, now linked to a broad oncology dataset, creating a highly specialized and powerful tool for a specific, high-need therapeutic area.

Accelerating Research and Shaping Future Treatments

The ultimate goal of these integrated datasets is to accelerate the development of new therapies and improve patient outcomes. For life sciences organizations, the applications are extensive. The high-quality, longitudinal real-world data can be used to generate real-world evidence (RWE) to support regulatory submissions to agencies like the FDA, potentially speeding up drug approvals.

Researchers can now analyze how different treatments are sequenced in the real world and study their effectiveness across diverse patient populations that may not be well-represented in traditional trials. The datasets can help optimize the design of future clinical studies by identifying patient subgroups most likely to benefit from a new therapy or by serving as an "external control arm," reducing the time and cost of development.

Furthermore, the detailed biomarker information embedded in the data allows for a more profound understanding of precision medicine in urologic cancers. By correlating biomarker status with treatment choices and outcomes, researchers can uncover insights that lead to more personalized and effective therapeutic strategies. For pharmaceutical companies, this data is also critical for market access and commercialization, helping them demonstrate the value of their products to payers and healthcare systems. By providing a clear, data-driven picture of the entire disease landscape, these datasets empower researchers to ask more sophisticated questions and find answers that were previously out of reach.