17th annual eyeforpharma Philadelphia (Commercial, Digital and Patients)

Apr 16, 2019 - Apr 17, 2019, Philadelphia

800+ pharma leaders join together to discuss how to revolutionize the patient experience – and, accordingly, their commercial performance.

Six Startups You Need To Know About

The pharma industry has many gaps that need to be filled. Here are six startups looking to fill them



The charge that the pharma industry is a laggard is misguided. The science involved in saving lives is cutting-edge and always improving. The fact that personalised medicine is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ demonstrates pharma’s dynamism.  

The science is, of course, only one piece of the puzzle. And big pharma does not have a monopoly on good ideas. The evolving regulatory, cultural and technological landscape calls for new talent and new ways of thinking.  

Here are six startups ready to take up the mantle:      

Aparito
Clinical trials are becoming more expensive and more complex, with a high number of hospital visits and cumbersome tests. At the same time patient centricity remains elusive, and the ability to capture and measure outcomes that are truly meaningful to patients has not been realised for clinical trials.

Aparito’s software platform aims to develop and validate new outcomes/endpoints in the form of digital biomarkers that can be captured remotely, in the patient’s home; making the experience of taking part in a clinical trial easier and contributing to making the possibility of decentralized trials a reality. 

Aparito offers a combination of deep regulatory understanding and a passion for innovative study designs with Atom5 — a digital solution for capturing, recording and reporting patient generated data and sharing it in real-time.

Utilizing a combination of video, voice, photos, text and wearables, patients share their symptoms, medication adherence, PROs and healthcare utility-patients insight and disease burden is captured in a meaningful way that does not create excessive burden for patients and carers. 

Exactcure
Drugs do good. They cure us. However, inaccurate medical treatments sometimes cause side effects that kill 5 times more than road accidents and cost the public healthcare system about €10 billion per year in France alone. This is very damaging to pharma’s reputation and society at large.

Thanks to ExactCure, they can now augment their drugs with a digital companion that will reassure the patient and improve adherence. Because patients can now simulate and visualize upfront the result of taking too many drugs or two incompatible drugs on their body based on their personal characteristics, they will be empowered to better take care of themselves – and avoid scandals that would have hurt the pharma’s reputation. This will also help to gather real-life evidence.

To do so, Exactcure create a Digital Twin for each patient, a digital avatar including one’s individual characteristics (gender, weight, age…), and simulates the effect and interactions of drugs on the patient. It is developing a software solution based on a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will pave the way to the upcoming era of personalized e-medicine, at the intersection between e-Health and personalized medicine.

This non-intrusive personalised health solution is able to predict the effects and interactions of drugs on each patient based on the specific characteristics of each individual such as weight, gender, age, size, genotype, activity, clinical data, and others, helping the patient to avoid under-doses, overdoses and drug-drug interactions. According to the patient’s choice, his/her health professionals can monitor him/her remotely in real time.

Medtep
Health is everything that happens when we are not in the doctor's office. Unfortunately, doctors often lack the tools to offer personalised care to increase the effectiveness of treatments prescribed (following medication adherence, encouraging healthy behavior and planning, monitoring patient's progress and help them meet their goals), and patients are at a loss as to how to complete their treatments and adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Medtep is a Barcelona-based healthtech company that aims to help patients understand and engage with their follow-up process. Medtep digitises the patient follow-up process between visits to the doctor to improve patient adherence and monitoring.

Medtep's Personalised Care Platform fosters treatment adherence and patient monitoring through personalised and dynamic prevention and treatment plans. It is a cross-pathology platform that includes the Professional website where the doctor can monitor and prescribe Care Plans to patients, who follow up through Medtep's Mobile Apps which can be synched to different wearables or devices.

Its scalable platform enables the rapid deployment of personalised care plans based on treatment protocols. Medtap have created care plans for a number of conditions with leading healthcare organisations and pharma companies that sponsor them under a B2B subscription model. Published studies have shown that the platform improves treatment outcomes and facilitates cost-effective care delivery. Medtep’s focus is on care plans for chronic and rare diseases, as well as mental health.

Nebula Genomics
Today very little genomic data exists, and it is highly fragmented, siloed and difficult to access. Nebula Genomics offers consumers and patients affordable personal genome sequencing and empowers them to control access to their personal genomic data. The aim is to give researchers access to a large network of individuals for on-demand genomic data generation, access, and analysis which will help study human genetics and develop new therapies.

Nebula Genomics is developing multiple cryptographic techniques to protect personal genomic data and address mounting privacy concerns. First, it encrypts genomic data with multiple keys that are held by multiple independent entities. This protects data against misuse, hacking and government access. Second, it uses blockchain technology to give individuals irrevocable ownership of their personal genomic data and enable transparent and controllable data sharing. Third, it is creating secure computing environments within which genomic data can be analysed while it remains protected. This is supported by a homomorphic data encryption scheme that enables execution of some computations on encrypted data.

To pharma companies, Nebula Genomics offers an end-to-end Genomics as a Service. Researchers can query its network, identify individuals of interest, pay for genomic data generation, and finally access and analyse the data. Importantly, this model shifts the sequencing costs to pharma and biotech companies. Combined with its privacy protection mechanisms, it expects to attract many people to join its network, which will become a very valuable resource for researchers and provide them with access to a patient/consumer-centric platform for on-demand data generation and/or trial recruiting.

Orikami
Current multiple sclerosis therapies do not provide optimal outcomes and patient adherence is low.
As a result, pharmaceutical companies struggle to get reimbursed and justify higher value of new drugs. The current standard of care consists of MRI scans and tests, which give a limited understanding of disease progression.

Orikami are aiming to fix this gap. Its digital health solution MS sherpa gives multiple sclerosis patients and their caregivers direct insight into their disease state. This is enabled via cognition, mobility and fatigue tests on the patient’s smartphone.

MS sherpa provides vital information on disease progression in between consults, to allow for optimisation of therapy and making lifestyle choices to improve outcomes.

On a weekly basis, patients conduct scheduled tests, give feedback to quality of life questions and can take personal notes. Smartphone sensors such as GPS, accelerometers, gyroscope and eye tracking determine the disease state.

This information can be used to treat to target and trigger potential switching of medication. MS Sherpa is validating its solution against subclinical disease activity from MRI scans.

MS sherpa is able to monitor effectiveness of a therapy on single patient level, to help identification of the best matching drug and provide evidence for improved outcomes to payers.

xbird
Non-adherence remains major a bottleneck for the healthcare system. There are many significant factors at play. Most therapies are complex and not tailored to the patient’s individual life circumstances. Each patient has to take a series of therapy relevant decisions every day but sees the doctor only every couple of months. This results in low therapy adherence and suboptimal medical outcomes.

To tackle this negative cycle xbird provides personalized medicine with AI. It has developed a technology that increases patient engagement and therapy adherence. The key for patient engagement is the identification of the patients’ individual behavior. By understanding individual patient behavior, xbird is able to react to life events in real-time and support the patient by sending the right information at the right time.

xbird is able to capture patient behavior automatically by processing signals from over 20 different sensors from common smartphones. These signals can be automatically translated into behavioural patterns and routines.

xbird offers a background technology that can be integrated into any existing digital product. We provide the technological capability to engage patients by adding a service layer to existing digital products. We work closely with clients to provide a tailored solution to fulfill individual patient needs and engagement goals.

The startups featured in this article will be taking part in our eyeforpharma Barcelona event this month.  

 



17th annual eyeforpharma Philadelphia (Commercial, Digital and Patients)

Apr 16, 2019 - Apr 17, 2019, Philadelphia

800+ pharma leaders join together to discuss how to revolutionize the patient experience – and, accordingly, their commercial performance.