Novartis Oncology, a division of the Switzerland-based  pharmaceutical company, has added two new free Apple and Android apps to its catalog: My NET Manage and Clinical Trial Seek. Interestingly, one of their most high-profile apps, VaxTrak, has now disappeared from the Apple and Google Play stores.

My NET Manager is an app for patients with neuroendocrine tumors (or NET) to help them manage and learn about their condition. It provides tools for users to track their symptoms, set reminders for treatments, doctor visits, and medication refills, and review and track test results. The app also stores contact information for a patients' healthcare team and enables the patient to share information with their team. Finally, the app can help NET patients track insurance claims.

The other new app, Clinical Trial Seek, is sourced from the National Institutes of Health's clinicaltrials.gov database. The app is designed to help doctors and patients find cancer clinical trials in their area, and to help patients learn more about clinical trials. Users can search trials by location, disease type, treatment, phase of trial, trial sponsor, eligibility requirements or keywords, and can save and email their results.

Novartis has several apps on the Google Play and Apple app stores including apps for tracking sickle cell disease and myelodysplastic syndrome and a medical information app for healthcare professionals. In 2011, we wrote about Novartis's VaxTrak app for keeping track of vaccinations, which was and still is featured both on Novartis' site and on Apple's corporate profile of the company. For some reason, VaxTrak is no longer available in the iOS AppStore or the Google Play store, and a spokesperson for the company couldn't provide an explanation before deadline.

In addition to apps, the company has been active in the mobile health innovation space, most notably as an early investor in Proteus Digital Health, a company that's developing ingestible sensors to track medication adherence.