By Alaric Dearment, Med City News | September 26, 2019
A panel discussion at the DTx East conference in Boston discussed whether partnerships between digital health and drugmakers were “a match made in heaven.”
With digital therapeutics becoming a growing component of the medical care ecosystem, it’s only natural that partnerships between the companies developing them and the drug industry should see growth as well. Probing the topic of whether such partnerships are a “match made in heaven,” the panelists also explored a bigger question: Are they an opportunity worth billions, or simply hundreds of millions of dollars?
The panel, at the DTx East conference at Harvard Medical School in Boston, brought together MediSafe CEO Omri Shor, Sanofi global head of digital therapeutics Bozidar Jovicevic, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals senior director for frontier business Georgia Mitsi and Sandoz vice president for global medical affairs Spencer Jones. Johnson & Johnson global head of digital innovation Cris de Luca served as moderator.
Of course, the bridging of the digital therapeutics and pharmaceutical worlds is nothing new. In November 2017, the Food and Drug Administration approved Otsuka Pharmaceutical’s Abilify MyCite, which consists of the psychiatric drug Abilify (aripiprazole) and an ingestible sensor designed to signal that the medication was taken.
When Jovicevic posed the question of whether drug-digital partnerships are worth hundreds of millions or a billion dollars to the audience, Shor raised his hand at “billion.”
MediSafe’s major focus is improving medication adherence, and in an interview on the sidelines of the conference, Shor pointed to a case study from the company whereby it found that its customized digital programs for thyroid, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases improved adherence by between 8-20 percent. If a drug has sales of $1 billion per year, he said, then better adherence could increase that to $1.2 billion.
“If you capture that opportunity to make a difference, then you get to much higher than a billion-dollar opportunity,” Shor said in the interview.