In the following table, the top pharma companies (ranked by 2014 annual sales) key stats for Q3 2015 are detailed in their reporting format and currency.
As promised, the summary of the 2nd day. I must admit, it is a bit long but all these topics were fascinating and the speakers really stood out from the “crowd” with excellent ideas. If you do not wish to read it all, just have a look at the headlines by scrolling down and skip to the topic that catches your eye.
With the current trends in demographic development,more than 2 million people in Switzerland will be over 65 in 2050. What does it mean? More surgery as ageing is very often the synonym of diseases.
Surgery is more and more helped by technological tools, especially for complex cases like facial surgery where augmented reality could be really useful. But, technology has to be human centered and it is the moto of Mimedis, a fab lab for surgeons. Together with small interdisciplinary teams, the company focuses on design and manufacture (3D printing) of patient specific bone implants.
The speaker is not only the founder of Mimedis but also the initiator of MedTech Innovation Partners (MTIP), which helps finance innovative medical technologies. MTIP has a clear focus on innovations within health technologies. It offers business building support as well as continuity of funding and its network to accelerate growth.
Nothing has changed fundamentally on how things are cut in surgery. But laser could be extremely helpful, leading to finer and more precise cuts. Plates will need to be smaller and even resorbable.
This technology also makes it be possible to perform functional cuts in order to avoid pain for the patient. It is a complete new thinking about how surgery is executed. No more straight cuts for an improved healing.
Together with enabling technologies, such as navigation and robots holding laser, surgery will be much more efficient with reduced doses of anesthesia and better recovery time.
The surgeon will not be replaced but empowered and the robot will be part of the surgery team.
AOT is dedicated to the development, manufacturing and sales of medical devices for osteotomy pursuing the vision of contact-free bone surgery using laser, robotics and navigation systems to re-invent bone surgery (osteotomy). 3 lasers are built into the system; one of them is a ruler and will measure across the cut. The main product, Carlo, is a robot, currently tested in animal experiments.
Innovation strategy coupled with human-centered design will deliver corporate value. Human-centered design is the primary goal of Erdmann Design.
For human-centered design to produce worthwile results, several and diverse stakeholders are requested to interact and think on how can you help with low tech simple solutions. Stand where problems occurred helps understand better the real context and will generate more relevant solutions.
It is not big data anymore but it is a tsunami of data. Not only text data but pictures, videos, sensor data… and 90% of the data was created in the last 2 years.
How can we use it? What’s in there?
Clinical data only represents 10% of data
Genomics factors reprsent 30%
Exogenous factors represent 60%. What do we mean when we say exogenous factors? It’s the information about lifestyle (diet, sport, smoking,…), behaviors, drug adherence. It is immensely useful when combined with all the other types of information.
Machine vs. Humans?
Humans are the best machine ever because of feelings such as compassion, intuition, design, value, judgement and common sense. No robot or machine is ever capable of such skills. However, machines have huge learning capabilities, especially deep learning (+ machine learning), discovery, large-scale math and fact checking. The last competency is crucial because, as of today, we do not know exactly what’s true on the internet.
The key: Human + Machine – rethink whats possible, what would you do, how could we use it…
Examples:
Memorial Sloan Kettering teams are partnering with IBM to train Watson to interpret cancer patients’ clinical information and identify individualized, evidence-based treatment options that leverage doctors’experience and research. Big data could stimulate the building of knowledge for diseases without current treatment option – what can we do, other medications, which data do we consider,…
Watson will help reduce the time of drug discovery by identifying markers quicker and accelerate the time to market for drug projects.
Cécile Monteil
The impact of technology on the patient-doctor relationship
Talking with patient was key before, science has now made huge progress. From “medicine is art” to “medicine is a science”. As a result, medicine today is taking the human touch away.
For a patient, talking and having explanations about the results of an exam is as important as undergoing an exam. Technology is here to increase the productivity of tasks but the relationship between the doctor and his patient has to stay and to be developed further. The human part of the process is already key in the healing process.
Technology can connect people. Today, technology allows patients to find information and to empower them. Participation in decision-making about treatment options and pathways is relevant for patients. Moreover, smartphone and connected objects can help track patient symptoms and treatment choices. It is used today for Type 1 Diabetes glucose monitoring.
With connected objects it is easier to monitor body parameters. Furthermore, doctors will be informed of those parameters and will be able to act upon.
The patient has to be at the center of care, beyond simply being part of the loop.
New types of expertise will show up, like medical data scientist, care coordinator, prevention doctor, education nurse,… and whole teams will collaborate in order to take care of the patient for better outcomes.
Yesterday, the patient-doctor relationship was compassionate, coordinated, comprehensive, continuous, accessible and family-centered. Today, the change is not only technological but also societal.
Patient-centered care is paradigm change, in which patients would like to be considered a they are and not as animals. A whole new ecosystem is emerging and developing itself.
Between a patient and his/her doctor, very often, there is a nurse. Thus, it is more a patient-nurse system or relationship.
But who is the expert?
It is crucial to visit the right expert that will be able to pose the right diagnostic. Provider empowerment (or nurse empowerment in this case) via technology will free time for the doctor while the nurse will do the consultation and collect the data to send them to the doctor. He will then be able to analyze them and act upon.
An interesting example comes from the dietitians of Canada, following obese patients and being their point of contact or new reference to talk to instead of the doctor.
Technology allows patients to stay connected with healthcare professionals following them. In addition, digital technology makes it possible for healthcare professional to be empowered.
Furthermore, caregivers and relatives can use digital technology as well. For example, Alertwatch is a tool giving relatives access to the localization of the loved one on a GPS map. Needless to say that caregivers will have more serenity, increased freedom themselves and improved information on the patient.
Remote support is complementary to human support without replacing it.
The speaker is the CEO of RetroBrain R&D and trying new approaches promoting people to live healthier. As we all know, it is difficult to incentivize now for long term benefits. The key to have a switch into the behaviors, it to change the way it is percieved: you change your behavior because it is cool and not for long term benefits.
Gamification and videogaming are fundamentally different from the actions you could perform right know. You do not even realize you are changing your own behavior.
How to motivate people? The game is challenging you again and again and when people succeed, they have a dopamine surge. These games influence will stimulate the brain and could delay dementia because of movements, social dimension and brain activity. The game can be personalized with car shapes and music appreciated by the patient.
Scott Smith
New emerging business models connected to the ageing society
The speaker is the founder of Changeist. For him, it is fundamental to look at the macro picture when it comes to ageing.
He took the interesting example of Paro, a companion cuddle robot. It is a seal puppet therapeutic robot. It has been tested is geriatric facilities to help patients cope with multiple diseases such as dementia.
The demographic time bomb challenge is fairly widespread.
Which solutions? Which possibilities?
Full automation, robots helping us, freeing time for more leisure
Designing our future
Human-machine combination – the pairing has to be culturally and socially acceptable
Senior Quantified-Self. These technologies will probably transform the way many families care for their loved ones. Estimated market size USD 14.6 bn in 2019.
California Life Company – Calico. It will help bring new technologies to the market and promote their adoption for a better management of ageing.
Intervention is easy to develop but the scale up is very difficult mainly for economic reasons.
Genotyping is the process of determining which genetic variants an individual possesses. Genotyping can be performed through a variety of different methods, depending on the variants of interest and resources available. For looking at many different variants at once, especially common variants, genotyping chips or arrays are an efficient and accurate option. These do, however, require prior knowledge of the variants you want to analyze.
Sequencing is a method used to determine the exact sequence of a certain length of DNA. You can sequence a short piece, the whole genome, or parts of the genome (such as the “exome,” which are the parts of the genome that contain genes). Depending on the location, a given stretch may include some DNA that varies between individuals, like SNPs, in addition to regions that are constant. Thus, sequencing can be used to genotype someone for known variants, as well as identify variants that may be unique to that person.
With genotyping, we look at SNP. We can then make some predictions with those data. For example: to see whether I will pass some of these genetic characteristics to my children. It is also widely used for ancestry analysis and microbiome exploration.
Why should this data be open?
Snpedia is sharing genomic data and helps determine whether you have higher risk. Connecting data to others can save lives. Big data is needed in this field.
Dna digest is promoting data sharing because of limited publicly available data despite huge sequenced DNA.
Malaria takes it toll on children as 86% of deaths are noted below age 5. Despite the 47% reduction in death since 2000 thank to an UN initiative focused on trying and improving public health in developing countries, the world still needs medicines to tackle the disease.
The traditional model of drug development in silos, obsessed by profitability and shareholders value is not working for developing countries. A reassessment on how we do drug discovery in this field is necessary.
A new model with a public health focus should be developed, like product development partnership. Interesting projcts are selected and funded. Advisors work in close collaboration with partners and open source science experienced.
How do they fund their late stage development candidate? They try to find a willing pharma partner or secure sufficient public funding.
Open Access initiative: empowering research.
20’000 drug discovery starting points have been published, MMV selected 400. They are all commercially available.
Another initiative has been launched in order to enrich the drug discovery database: the Malaria Box. Launched in 2011, it has already been supplied to 30 countries for a total of 218 boxes.
A new project: thePathogen Box, same initiative for neglected diseases to stimulate further research.
There is an ever increasing role of open source in new drug discovery models.
Gernot Abel
Going open innovation and citizen science in biotech
The speaker sees brand new opportunities for collaborative innovation.
How we manage, develop and initiate innovation will shift from traditional to open approaches.
When you create into a community you not only achieve, you exceed what you achieve.
Hackers want to change something and add a new innovation to existing products. The epicenter is both in US and Europe. Novozymes started recently to collaborate with hackers in an open mode. Biologigaragen is an open space for citizen science in biology. In addition, tools are getting cheaper, easier to use and more powerful.
Examples:
Open trons is a USD 3000 full lab available to everyone.
Transcriptic is a a fully automated cell and molecular biology laboratory in the cloud.
SYNENERGENE is a four-years mobilization and mutual learning action plan (MMLAP) supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme.
Joint value capture is fully present when engaging in open innovation.
For Novozyme, open innovation brings a lot:
Low cost analytical technologies
Evaluation on given technology and opportunities
Insight for business development projects
Spot the next big theme in biotech
Societal impact and mutual learning cycles
Last but not least – a fantastic lesson on how to engage in open innovation.
I had the fantastic opportunity to attend the annual Lift Basel Conference at the end of October. The topics covered as well as the speakers were amazing.
I must admit, it is always refreshing to have access to all those passionate people with jaw-dropping experiences, new companies, innovative business models, renewed thinking (totally out of the box! even without the box!!)…
I really appreciated it and I’m delighted to share the main points with you, one talk at a time with added references on the discussed topic. I hope you’ll enjoy the first day! The second one is coming soon.
Rob Carlson is interested in the future role of biology as a human technology. He has worked to develop new biological technologies in both academic and commercial environments, focusing on molecular measurement and microfluidic systems. He has also developed a number of new technical and economic metrics for measuring the progress of biological technologies.
Rob Carlson has been precisely predicting exponential drops in the costs of DNA sequencing and synthesis (reading and writing DNA), and resulting impacts on the global economy. The Economist magazine in 2006 identified this as the biotechnological equivalent of Moore’s Law, and named it the Carlson Curve after Rob.
It was extremely interesting to see him explaining that, in biology, every piece has its purpose and, then, it can be repurposed. Needless to say, synthetic biology has evolved fantastically over time, from a single gene in a single cell to cell-grown organs as shown in the Nature chart below.
Biotechnology will soon take over the other segments of the economy, like chemicals, energy generation,… Biochemicals are already competing today with oil chemicals. According to the last numbers recently published, biotechnology is the fastest growing field in the US economy. Economics are at the center as they are really driving the adoption of those technologies.
“The promise of synthetic biology lies in its engineering roots. Engineers are trained to define, modularize, stan-dardize, characterize, specify, optimize, and control physi-cal systems in order to deliver reliable, repeatable outcomes. When such approaches are applied to biological experimentation, the results can be marvelous. When measurement systems and data are standardized and qualified, then biological knowledge can be stacked upon other knowledge in an information supply chain distributed across hundreds of thousands of people. If we standardize and improve the quality of biological characterization, then the tools for efficiently designing and building ever more complex systems will soon follow.”
Neil Goldsmith
New food ingredients into custom-built organism
Nature has treasures but sometimes we need huge amounts of raw materials to extract flavors or fragrances in tiny quantities. For example, vanilla is regularly made from petrochemicals and rarely extracted from vanilla seed pods as demand is far larger than supply.
Evolva developed a revolutionary technology to brew flavors from yeast.
For example, to manufacture Stevia, a natural sweetner, Evolva takes the genes the plant uses to make that molecule and put those genes into the yeast so it can make the molecule. They then ferment the yeast by brewing, just like with beer. The yeast takes up the sugar, turns it into Stevia and pumps it out; the yeast is filtered off and Stevia is in the «broth» which can be purified out.
Synthetic biology is an iterative process. It is not smooth, you need to go back and forth at each step. However, it has and will lead transformational changes on today’s science.
According to Xavier Duportet, editing DNA has become as simple as editing a newspaper. It is now possible to modify the DNA with a repair template.
That’s exactly what he’s doing: using CRISPR/Cas for the microbiome engineering. As we all know, antibiotics are not an adequate solution as they kill all the bugs… Bad and good ones. Eligo Bioscience, founded in May 2014 by Xavier Duportet as well as scientists and professors from the Rockefeller University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), found a fantastic way to tackle this issue: hijack the CRISPR/Cas system of the bacteria. Below a video (in French) explaining the technology.
Their “synthetic biology platform, which combines CRISPR/Cas system with engineered phage capsids, develops “eligobiotics”: a new generation of highly precise antimicrobials. They can program the eligobiotics to eliminate bacteria based on the genetic sequences they carry in their genome. As opposed to traditional antibiotics, their sequence-specific antimicrobials can therefore discriminate between close bacterial strains and selectively eradicate harmful bacteria from the microbiome while sparing the beneficial ones.”
Eligo Bioscience is also working on other diseases such as inflamatory bowel disease, acne. The company owns an exclusive license for the use of CRISP in the antibacterials field.
Reto Schnyder expects major disruption in food, especially in the field of business models.
We spend a lot of money on food. The consumer behavior is really changing. More and more online grocery shopping is used, as demonstrated by huge growth rates as well as booming household penetration rates.
Companies are trying hard to stimulate purchases and expand their reach. AmazonDash on AmazonFresh is a wonderful example of what can be done.
Amazon is definitely good at understanding big data and will not put somthing stupid in your basket, it will always suggest you new products to try.
Several other examples help us to understand the changes taking place in the food industry such as HelloFresh, June Intelligent Oven,…
Cooking good food is easier and easier. And this is just the beginning.
Before the food industry structure was: brands – shop – cook. But now the ranking has changed: cook – shop – brands!
In the cosmetics and toiletries industry, the shaving blades domain has been completely shaken by outsiders, like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s Blades. They put in place subscription services and Dollar Shave Club took over 10% market share in units in USA.
Lesson learned: easy to attack global power brands as they are not invincible.
Wisdom: how can we make our cash cow irrelevant? Disrupt the market before other companies do it.
How can drones can provide wings to farmers? The use of drones, coupled with analytical tools, could help farmers make better decisions.
Field analysis on foot is only giving a partial view of the crops. With a new software technology, Pix4D, it is possible to “automatically process terrestrial and aerial imagery acquired by light-weight drones or aircraft based purely on image content. This desktop software converts images into highly precise, timely and customizable results for a wide range of GIS and CAD applications.”
Experiments and tests are implemented in order to optimize yields. The systems are also helping to decide when and where to start the harvest.
Moreover, it is incredibly useful to detect diseases early by identifying spectral signatures. With the use big data and re-engineering, close monitoring is now feasible. Flight plan is defined in advance in order to optimize which data to record. Sensefly is targeting multiple industries like agriculture, mining, humanitarian, environmental protection. Vitiscan is fully dedicated to vineyards.
Those technologies and their applications will lead to more transparency on which species to seed, which and how much fertilizers allowing for better quality and quantity of crops as well as improved variety.
“Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
Tim Brown, president and CEO, IDEO
There is no need to say more than the definition given by Tim Brown. It is really self-explanatory.
When it comes to scientific method, the approach is different.
In this way of thinking, you try to understand first, then hypothetize and start data collection, once it’s done you can analyze data and select some criteria. Ultimately, you can ask for peer review and then publish your work.
Neither of these methods serve as a path for the solution to more societal problems. It is then fundamental to combine both of them with system thinking and action. Transdisciplinarity is another crucial component toward solutions.
The main message of the talk was: “Whatever you produce and send to the society has an impact on the society itself. It is crucial to develop self-awareness and impact analysis of actions on society.
The Digit@l Pillbox - Life Sciences Industry Trends 