- The convergence of MedTech and pharma can generate innovative combination devices that promise significant therapeutic and commercial benefits
- Combination devices such as advanced drug delivery systems offer more precise, predictable and personalized healthcare
- The global market for advanced drug delivery systems is US$196bn and growing
- Biosensors play a role in convergence and innovative drug delivery systems
- Roger Kornberg, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and 2006 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry describes the technological advances, which are shaping new medical therapies
The convergence of MedTech and pharma and the role of biosensors
MedTech and pharma companies are converging.
What role do biosensors play in such a convergence?
Traditionally, MedTech and big pharma have progressed along parallel paths. More recently, however, their paths have begun to converge in an attempt to gain a competitive edge in a radically changing healthcare landscape. Convergence leverages MedTech’s technical expertise and pharma’s medical and biological agents to develop combination devices. These are expected to significantly improve diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of 21st century chronic lifetime diseases, and thereby make a substantial contribution to an evolving healthcare ecosystem that demands enhanced patient outcomes, and effective cost-containment.
Conventional diagnostics & drug delivery
Conventional in vitro diagnostics for common diseases are costly, time-consuming, and require centralized laboratories, experienced personnel and bulky equipment. Standard processes include the collection and transportation of biological samples from the point of care to a centralized laboratory for processing by experienced personnel. After the results become available, which usually takes days, the laboratory notifies doctors, who in turn contact patients, and modify their treatments as required. Conventional modes of treatment have mainly consisted of simple, fast-acting pharmaceuticals dispensed orally or as injectables. Such limited means of drug delivery slows the progress of drug development since most drugs are formulated to accommodate the conventional oral or injection delivery routes. Concerns about the quantity and duration of a drug’s presence, and its potential toxic effect on proximal non-diseased tissue drives interest in alternative drug delivery systems and fuels the convergence of MedTech and pharma.
The end of in vitro diagnostics
Roger Kornberg, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, reflects on the limitations of conventional in vitro diagnostics, and describes how technological advances facilitate rapid point-of-care diagnostics, which are easier and cheaper:
Converging interest
Illustrative of the MedTech-pharma convergence is Verily's (formerly Google Life Sciences) partnership with Novartis to develop smart contact lenses to correct presbyopia, (age-related farsightedness), and for monitoring diabetes by measuring glucose in tears. Otsuka’s, partnership with Proteus Digital Health is another example. This venture expects to develop an ingestible drug adherence device. Proteus already has a FDA-approved sensor, which measures medication adherence. Otsuka is embedding the Proteus’s sensor, which is the size of a sand particle, into its medication for severe mental illnesses in order to enhance drug adherence, which is a serious problem. 50% of prescribed medication in the US is not taken as directed, resulting in unnecessary escalation of conditions and therapies, higher costs to health systems, and a serious challenge for clinical studies.
Drivers of change
The principal drivers of MedTech-pharma convergence include scientific and technological advances, ageing populations, increased chronic lifestyle diseases, emerging-market expansion, and developments in therapies. All have played a role in changing healthcare demands and delivery landscapes. Responding to these changes, both MedTech and pharma have continued to emphasize growth, while attempting to enhance value for payers and patients. This has resulted in cost cutting, and a sharper focus on high-performing therapeutics. It has also fuelled MedTech-pharma convergence and the consequent development of combination devices. According to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Life Science Outlook, combination devices “will likely continue to rapidly increase in number and application”.
MedTech’s changing business model
Over the past two decades, MedTech has been challenged by tighter regulatory scrutiny, and continued pressure on healthcare budgets, but advantaged by technological progress, which it has embraced to create new business models. This has been rewarded by positive healthcare investment trends. Over a similar period, pharma has been challenged by the expiry of its patents, advances in molecular science, and changing demographics, but buoyed by increased healthcare spending trends, although the forces that increase health costs are being tempered by a demand for value.
As pharma has been increasingly challenged, so interest has increased in the potential of MedTech to address some of the more pressing healthcare demands in a radically changing healthcare ecosystem. Unlike pharma, MedTech has leveraged social, mobile, and cloud technologies to develop new business models and innovative devices for earlier diagnoses, faster and less invasive interventions, enhanced patient monitoring, and improved management of lifetime chronic conditions.
Josh Shachar, founder of several successful US technology companies and author of a number of patents, describes the new healthcare ecosystem and some of the commercial opportunities it offers, which are predicated on the convergence of MedTech and pharma:
The decline of big pharma’s traditional business model
Pharma’s one-size-fits-all traditional business model, which has fuelled its commercial success over the past century, is based on broad population averages. This now is in decline as patents expire on major drugs, and product pipelines diminish. For example, over the past 30 years the expiry of pharma’s patents cost the industry some US$240bn.
Advances in genetics and molecular biology, which followed the complete sequencing of the human genome in 2003, revolutionized medicine and shifted its focus from inefficient one-size-fits-all drugs to personalized therapies that matched patients to drugs via diagnostic tests and biomarkers in order to improve outcomes, and reduce side effects. Already 40% of drugs in development are personalized medicines, and this is projected to increase to nearly 70% over the next five years.
Today, analysts transform individuals’ DNA information into practical data, which drives drug discovery and diagnostics, and tailors medicines to treat individual diseases. This personalized medicine aims to target the right therapy to the right patient at the right time, in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs, and is transforming how healthcare is delivered and diseases managed.
Personalized medicine
Personalized medicine has significantly dented pharma’s one-size-fits-all strategies. In general, pharma has been slow to respond to external shocks, and slow to renew its internal processes of discovery and development. As a result, the majority of new pharma drugs only offer marginal benefits. Today, pharma finds itself trapped in a downward commercial spiral: its revenues have plummeted, it has shed thousands of jobs, it has a dearth of one-size-fits-all drugs, and its replacement drugs are difficult-to-find, and when they are, they are too expensive.
Illustrative of the advances in molecular science that helped to destroy pharma’s traditional commercial strategy is the work of Kornberg. Here he describes an aspect of his work that is related to how biological information encoded in the genome is accessed to inform the direction of all human activity and the construction of organisms for which Kornberg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006, and created the foundations of personalized medicine:
Advanced drug delivery systems
Over the past 20 years, as pharma has struggled commercially and MedTech has shifted its business model, drug delivery systems have advanced significantly. Evolving sensor technologies have played a role in facilitating some of these advances, and are positioned to play an increasingly important role in the future of advanced drug delivery. According to BCC Research, the global market for advanced drug delivery systems, which increase bioavailability, reduce side effects, and improve patient compliance, increased from US$134bn in 2008 to some US$196bn in 2014.
The growth drivers for innovative drug delivery systems include recent advances of biological drugs such as proteins and nucleic acids, which have broadened the scope of therapeutic targets for a number of diseases. There are however, challenges.
Proteins are important structural and functional biomolecules that are a major part of every cell in your body. There are two nucleic acids: DNA and RNA. DNA stores and transfers genetic information, while RNA delivers information from DNA to protein-builders in the cells.
For instance, RNA is inherently unstable, and potentially immunogenic, and therefore requires innovative, targeted delivery systems. Such systems have benefitted significantly from progress in biomedical engineering and sensor technologies, which have enhanced the value of discoveries of bioactive molecules and gene therapies, and contributed to a number of new, advanced and innovative combination drug delivery systems, which promise to be more efficacious than conventional ones.
Biosensors
The use of biosensors in drug delivery system is not new. The insulin pump is one example. Introduced in its present form some 30 years ago, the insulin pump is a near-physiologic programmable method of insulin delivery that is flexible and lifestyle-friendly.
Biosensors are analytical tools, which convert biological responses into electrical signals. In healthcare, they provide analyses of chemical or physiological processes and transmit that physiologic data to an observer or to a monitoring device. Historically, data outputs generated from these devices were either analog in nature or aggregated in a fashion that was not conducive to secondary analysis. The latest biosensors are wearable and provide vital sign monitoring of patients, athletes, premature infants, children, psychiatric patients, people who need long-term care, elderly, and people in remote regions.
Increased accuracy and speed
The success of biosensors is associated with their ability to achieve very high levels of precision in measuring disease specific biomarkers both in vitro and in vivo environments. They use a biological element, such as enzymes, antibodies, receptors, tissues and microorganisms capable of recognizing or signalling real time biochemical changes in different inflammatory diseases and tumors. A transducer is then used to convert the biochemical signal into a quantifiable signal that can be transmitted, detected and analysed, and thereby has the potential, among other things, for rapid, accurate diagnosis and disease management.
Recent technological advances have led to the development of biosensors capable of detecting the target molecule in very low quantities and are considered to have enhanced capacity for increased accuracy and speed of diagnosis, prognosis and disease management. Biosensors are robust, inexpensive, easy to use, and more importantly, they do not require any sample preparation since they are able to detect almost any biomarker - protein, nucleic acid, small molecule, etc. - within a pool of other bimolecular substances. Recently, researchers have developed various innovative strategies to miniaturize biosensors so that they can be used as an active integral part of tissue engineering systems and implanted in vivo.
Market for biosensors
Over the past decade, the market in biosensors and bioinformatics has grown; driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), increased computer power, enhanced network connectivity, miniaturization, and large data storage capacity.
Today, biosensors represent a rapidly expanding field estimated to be growing at 60% per year, albeit from a low start. In addition to providing a critical analytical component for new drug delivery systems, biosensors are used for environmental and food analysis, and production monitoring. The estimated annual world analytical market is about US$12bn, of which 30% is in healthcare. There is a vast market expansion potential for biosensors because less than 0.1% of the analytical market is currently using them.
A significant impetus of this growth comes from the healthcare industry, where there is increasing demand for inexpensive and reliable sensors across many aspects of both primary and secondary healthcare. It is reasonable to assume that a major biosensor market will be where an immediate assay is required, and in the near-term patients will use biosensors to monitor and manage treatable lifetime conditions, such as diabetes cancer, and heart disease.
The integration of biosensors with drug delivery
The integration of biosensors with drug delivery systems supports improved disease management, and better patient compliance since all information in respect to a person’s medical condition may be monitored and maintained continuously. It also increases the potential for implantable pharmacies, which can operate as closed loop systems that facilitate continuous diagnosis, treatment and prognosis without vast data processing and specialist intervention. A number of diseases require continuous monitoring for effective management. For example, frequent measurement of blood flow changes could improve the ability of health care providers to diagnose and treat patients with vascular conditions, such as those associated with diabetes and high blood pressure. Further, physicochemical changes in the body can indicate the progression of a disease before it manifests itself, and early detection of illness and its progression can increase the efficacy of therapeutics.
Takeaways
Combination devices, which are triggered by the convergence of MedTech and pharma, offer substantial therapeutic and commercial opportunities. There is significant potential for biosensors in this convergence. The importance of biosensors is associated with their operational simplicity, higher sensitivity, ability to perform multiplex analysis, and capability to be integrated into different functions using the same chip. However, there remain non-trivial challenges to reconcile the demands of performance and yield to simplicity and affordability.
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