Industry executives predict the next ‘blue oceans’ in pharma

eClinical Solutions CEO and co-founder Raj Indupuri is featured in this article about where life science leaders see breakthroughs happening in the industry.

Where life science leaders see breakthroughs happening in the industry.

Developing breakthrough treatments, creating new markets and setting audacious goals to improve patient care is what the PharmaVoice community is known for. Using a Blue Ocean lens, leaders share their future-facing ideas for a better tomorrow, which include personalized medicine, digitization and fully realized data insights. These are the landscape disrupters that will create innovation in the industry.

For this installment of our ongoing series, “PharmaVoice Forecast,” which features predictions and insights from our community of life science executives, we asked leaders what they thought would be the next frontier for the pharma industry.

Automating drug development

“The industry’s blue ocean is the increased automation across the clinical development process. The goal is to better support precision medicines and maximize the insights from ever-richer data streams, ideally making better matches between patients with unmet medical needs and the targeted therapies in development that will most benefit them.” ~Raj Indupuri, CEO, eClinical Solutions, PharmaVoice 100

Managing disease through digital therapeutics

“Digital therapeutics is the next frontier and presents a new way for us to manage disease symptoms and comorbidities. These therapeutics are extremely patient-focused and designed for a specific patient population and disease burden. For example, if you look at a disease like epilepsy, there is data to show that stress can bring upon seizures. If you can help control stress levels through a digital therapeutic, not only could you improve quality of life, you could also potentially improve the efficacy of the therapeutic by learning more about how the disease progresses and responds to treatment.” ~Colin Lake, VP, head of digital business transformation neurology, UCB

Personalizing treatment plans

“The most exciting frontier is already rippling in the rare disease space: truly personalized medicine. We already see the success of genetically targeted treatment, but the bluest ocean is in designing each person’s total treatment plan for their personal genome, their lifestyle, and their medical history. The opportunity for life-sciences to wrap around one patient’s needs will be built on unprecedented levels of patient engagement, data sharing and care coordination; these models are out there now, and pharma can play a unifying role.” ~Jack Barrette, chief innovation officer, Health Union, PharmaVoice Red Jacket

Deriving richer outcome measures from novel sources

“Beyond what is commonly done now, we see a huge opportunity for the collection of valuable insights through novel endpoints and approaches. Leveraging rich insights early in drug development provides greater knowledge about treatment effects to support regulatory submissions and labelling, not to mention enable accurate, early go/no-go decision making. We see the potential to develop and study new outcome measures from a variety of novel sources for richer insights — voice, video, photography, geo-fencing, new sensors and more. These all offer exciting potential to learn more about treatment effects, and when combined with advancing approaches such as AI and machine learning, may have a role in helping to guide the interpretation of data.” ~Bill Byrom, PhD, VP, Product Intelligence and Positioning, Signant Health, PharmaVoice 100

A digital future provides health benefits

“Without a doubt, the next frontier for life-sciences is the incorporation of digital health technologies into daily life. Continuous monitoring of patients will provide a much more complete understanding of their health. This will enable a whole range of benefits, including early interventions — reducing hospital admissions and improving health in general, allowing closed-loop therapies — e.g., automated insulin infusions based on glucose levels, and even digital therapeutics, such as a cell phone app to help patients manage musculoskeletal pain. In the short-term, clinical trials will be shorter and their data more reliable because they are employing more accurate measures of patient health.” ~Geoffrey Gill, President of Shimmer Americas, Shimmer Research

Listening to patients unleashes opportunities

“The next frontier for the life-sciences, which I’m privileged to help unlock and energize, is bringing the patient voice front and center into the industry. For far too long the end user of all our products, services and experiences has been neglected and misunderstood. Patients don’t want to be patronized, talked down to or sold to. They are grappling with the burden of their illness — but that challenge doesn’t define them, and their concerns go well beyond the dynamics of their disease. Instead, patients yearn for understanding, open dialogue and a robust connection with like-minded souls who care. The life-sciences industry has an enormous opportunity to empower patients through listening and engagement.” ~Fabio Gratton, CEO, inVibe Labs, PharmaVoice 100

Maximizing untapped data for better outcomes

“The next frontier for the life-sciences industry is setting a new precedent for data utilization in which clinical-, research- and patient-reported data are leveraged to their fullest extent in the scientific process. But we don’t want to cut corners by offering a free product in exchange for commercial ownership of a patient’s health data. We must empower scientists and clinicians to leverage often untapped data points for maximum impact.

As a result of an accelerated scientific process, treatments are accelerated and the impact across the care continuum is boundless. For example, data has the potential to prevent asthma attacks requiring emergency room visits and hospitalization. In turn, this brings down the cost of healthcare, while opening beds for the most critically ill who require advanced care. Better integrated data is also essential to help us tackle health inequities.” ~James Kugler, director, Syntropy

Personal choice treatments

“Precision medicine consists of giving the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. We want to go beyond precision medicine and enter a new era. in which personalized medicine allows patients to choose the treatments that they like best. This is the next step that will revolutionize medicine in the near future.” ~Damien Tremolet, CEO, IDDI

Entering the age of “micropersonalization”

“Personalized medicine has been a hallmark achievement of the past 20 years. However, we are rapidly reaching an inflection point where personalization becomes possible at an individual level. Just as each genome is unique, drug therapies will eventually be engineered to address each patient’s unique needs. The age of micropersonalized medicine is not far away.” ~Steve Hamburg, managing partner and chief strategy officer, Calcium