Steve Jobs famously said during his last few days of battling cancer - “The biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology”. I think we are finally getting there with recent advancements in precision medicine giving birth to therapies that we’ve only dreamed of in science fiction movies - from editing faulty genes to injecting mRNA into cells have ushered a new revolution that even years of evolution haven’t accomplished. As we start analyzing these trends, it’s obvious the boundaries are starting to blur across Pharma, Providers and Payers - All pointing towards the holy grail - patient centricity. Here are our top 5 technology trends for Healthcare and Life Sciences in no particular order.
Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML)
Data science and its application in Drug research or medical diagnosis is nothing new. However the real inflection point is recent advancements in AI/ML such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI, Computer Vision, etc. These advancements are finally matured enough to solve complex industry problems such as Drug design, Genome sequencing, Protein folding, Medical diagnostics, etc. The recent hype created by chatGPT demonstrated the power of Generative AI models and its ability to traverse through complex unstructured data to generate answers. In the case of Healthcare this could mean providing diagnosis to a physician before they start theirs or let AI design the next protein drug based on data.
The organizations that effectively use AI will differentiate themselves. For instance, Mayo Clinic’s Colonoscopy algorithm has a miss rate of 3% lesions compared to a physician whose miss rate is 20% in endoscopies. Dr. Halamka says, "In five years from now, practice without AI will be considered malpractice." In the case of Genomics, “an AI/ML-based system that trains on data sets is better at detecting nuances and figuring out how to make a variant call than humans,” says John Ellithorpe, president, DNAnexus. The message is loud and clear, “Embrace AI or go out of business”.
Personalized medicine
The traditional drug research was hugely trial and error based which is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. However, the recent advancements in Genomics have given birth to life saving therapies such as Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT), Gene editing techniques such as CRISPR, and even how Covid vaccines were developed. During 2023, patients will have more opportunities to receive healthcare that is personalized for them. Their personalized medicine will take into account a person's genetic information and can help physicians predict how effective specific drugs will be or what will be the side effects. AI and ML models will play a huge role in helping with these predictions.
A huge bottleneck in Personalized therapies such as Cell & Gene Therapy (CGT) or CRISPR is the complex process of drawing blood, re-engineering Gene and injecting back into a patient. However with advancements in Allogeneic therapies, a T-cell drawn from a healthy donor can be used for treating multiple patients, thereby making the treatment more accessible and affordable. There is already a ton of investments flowing into this space from Big Pharmas and we are just getting started.
Image credit : BCG analysis
Patient Centricity
Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare providers have typically taken the patient experience for granted. As a patient, you can order from Amazon in one click and watch personalized movie recommendations on Netflix. However when it comes to Healthcare, a patient still has to deal with faxes, manually calling in to schedule appointments and no meaningful way to look at their data. A combination of compliance regulations, legacy applications and siloed systems and processes have resulted in a broken patient experience.
Similarly Pharmas have always considered Physicians as their customers and patients have always been an afterthought. However with the advent of personalized therapies, Biopharmas are in a mad rush to digitally revamp their entire patient journey from recruitment, through engagement to successful completion of journey. However the holy grail of creating a harmonized and enriched patient profile across an entire organization requires transformation of both processes as well as IT systems. Biopharmas and healthcare providers have to look into modern systems such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Data lakes, etc that will help them build a repository of patient’s structured and unstructured data. The organizations with better patient experience will win over the ones that don’t.
Wearable Medical Devices
The wearables and connected devices have rapidly expanded in recent years from simple devices designed to track vital signs such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels to smart watches capable of sophisticated scans such as ECGs, smart textiles that can detect blood pressure and predict the risk of heart attacks, and smart gloves that can reduce the tremors suffered by patients with Parkinson’s Disease. The ability to understand a patient’s physiology at all times in a real-world setting is a game changer for drug development, clinical trials and health in general.
Wearables have also helped accelerate clinical trial timelines via decentralized and hybrid clinical trials. continuous monitoring and collecting patient data from devices such as wearables from home mimics a real world setting compared to collecting data from a controlled environment like sites. This means improved access to Real World Data (RWD) and Real World Evidence (RWE). Sponsors can now recruit patients from anywhere and the patient's distance from the site is not a hurdle anymore. The advantages are multi-fold in commercial and personalized therapies as well. However Life Sciences and Healthcare organizations need to be prepared to manage this deluge of data to take advantage of the innovations in this space.
Image credit: Dr. Tazeen Rizvi
Digital Health
The Digital Health market had a reality check in 2022 after an incredible 2020 and 2021 where we witnessed a mad rush of funding and startups. However the good news is this ushers us into a new era “Digital Health 2.0” with focus on products that are clinically relevant and have greater clinical evidence and viable business models. In 2023, we will witness the market move from the flurry of iOS apps for Sleeping & Meditation to more Clinically relevant products such as Personal EKG, portable ultrasounds, remote patient monitoring, etc.
We have already seen Biopharmas start to focus on Digital Health portfolios and partner with Digital health startups to accelerate Drug development, Clinical trials and better patient monitoring and data collection. 2023 will be a challenging year for Digital Health, however the new landscape will strengthen the pipeline of ventures, driving innovation and business model viability further to bring the Digital Health promise nearer.
My take on the BIGGEST Opportunity for 2023
It is an obvious fact the most folks who got rich out of the California gold rush are not the ones who mined for gold, but the ones who sold them the tools - picks, shovels and of course Jeans. The one tool that is going to significantly impact drug discovery and healthcare is going to be AI/ML. However it will be impossible for Biopharmas and Healthcare organizations to solve their data problem by hiring, assembling and building a data science team. If companies can solve a specific problem, for instance a vertical ML model trained on Tumor data, it can be sold to a Healthcare provider who can run it on their patient data to improve diagnostics rather than build it on their own.
As AI becomes increasingly democratized and underlying ML models commoditized, there will be a myriad of vertical ML models that will target niche problems. This is pretty much like how companies embraced Software as a Service (SaaS) products over the on-premise products that needed an army of people to deploy and manage. However the challenge here is not building the specific ML model, but access to the real world patient data to train the model and generate clinical evidence. So real winners are going to be a domain focussed technology players who can gain access to data. This is what I think will be the biggest opportunity of 2023 - “MaaS - Model as a Service.”
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Subash Rajavel is the founder and Chief editor at xGenom. He has 15 plus years of experience in Health care and Life Sciences. His primary focus are Patient centric solutions, Digital Health and Next-gen Clinical Trial solutions. You can reach him at subash@xgenom.com
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