Biopharma companies are looking beyond launching drugs to launching solutions. Solutions include the use of devices and programs with the drug. Whether it is ideas such as J&J's iPhone app for diabetics or simple glucose monitors it is clear that probability of achieving the health outcome can be improved significantly.
To understand consumer experiences with and expectations around the “wellness devices,” IBM’s Institute for Business Value surveyed over 1300 consumers most likely to be familiar with such devices: people who are living with chronic illnesses or who are caregivers. The survey was conducted in both the U.S. and U.K., yielding views of consumers who access different types of health systems.
The study is not published yet though.. it will be launched at a webcast on April 21, 2010 9:00 am - 10:30 am EDT. You can register for this webcast through this link.
The webcast will share:
What types of wellness devices are being used today?
What types of wellness devices would consumers like to see, and how much are they willing to pay for them?
What factors influence consumers’ device selection?
The strategies of the largest biopharma companies have been adding focus to emerging markets for some time now. The NEJM published a paper today showing exactly why the focus is critical to the health of the population in those markets.
The researchers from the China National Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders Study Group conducted a national study from June 2007 through May 2008 to estimate the prevalence of diabetes among Chinese adults. The results are staggering.
Their research suggests that China has around 92 million diabetics. This double what the International Diabetes Federation has estimated. Furthermore it is significantly more than India which is estimated to be at 50 million today. A conservative estimate of $440 (USD) per annum to treat a diabetic would suggest that the Chinese market opportunity today is over $40BN (1% of 2009 China GDP) and when one includes India a $60BN market. To get some perspective on that market size one needs to consider that in 2007, the diabetes treatment market worldwide was worth in the region of $25 billion.
Success in addressing this pandemic will be the challenge of biopharma companies and healthcare organizations around the world. What remains unclear is how we will find the funds to provide for this exploding need for healthcare.
A team of researchers at the renowned Scripps Research Institute has discovered two new compounds that prove the existence of new binding sites on HIV protease. Associate Professor C. David Stout, senior author of the study, explained “These results open the door to a whole new approach to drug design against HIV protease,” which is an enzyme used by HIV to create new, infectious viral particles.
Two members of the FightAIDS@Home team, Research Associate Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D., and Professor Arthur J. Olson, were part of this innovative research and are now working to extend it. This experimental breakthrough will serve as the basis for new drug development to combat the increasing number of drug-resistant HIV strains and to improve the potency of current drug therapies. The results form the groundwork for a new class of more powerful treatments to fight HIV/AIDS. The findings appear as the March cover story in the journal Chemical Biology and Drug Design.
Utilizing computing power from 1.5 million devices networked through IBM’s World Community Grid, the new sites on the HIV protease are being used as docking targets for virtual screening experiments, in order to guide the development of these chemical compounds into a new class of potent HIV inhibitors. Using the massive computational resources of the World Community Grid, the FightAIDS@Home team has already docked over 500,000 compounds against these newly characterized binding sites.
By aggregating the unused cycle time of 1.5 million personal computers donated by volunteers in over 80 countries, World Community Grid is now the world’s largest public humanitarian grid, equivalent in power to a Top 15 supercomputer, and crunched more than 107,000 years of computational time in just 5 years for the Scripps Research Institute project, providing more than 104 million calculations.
“IBM’s World Community Grid and its volunteers help us run millions of computations to evaluate the potential interactions between compounds and mutant viral proteins,” said Dr. Arthur J. Olson, Anderson Research Chair Professor, Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute. “Through this effort we were able to significantly speed up our investigation. Without the computational power of World Community Grid, it would have taken us many more years to get to this important step in our research.”
Once the HIV virus enters a human cell, it uses a small set of proteins called enzymes to force the cell to produce many new copies of itself, which then go on to infect other cells. Most HIV drugs work by blocking the operation of one or more of these enzymes. In the current work, the Scripps researchers are looking for new compounds that will stabilize the inhibited conformation, or shape, of the HIV protease enzyme, and thus help stop the virus from replicating. Because HIV mutates so frequently, some drugs that inhibit the enzyme from replicating are no longer working, or are not working as effectively. By running calculations on the World Community Grid FightAIDS@Home project, the team at Scripps is trying to develop new drugs that bind to more parts of the mutant enzyme, thereby shutting it down more effectively.
We are in the process of developing our BioPartnering 2010 study. The study examines three areas:
Deal Sourcing: - Proactively sourcing for the best deals and enabling prospective partners to easily access the pharma company; building a reputation for being a “Partner of Choice”
Deal Making: - Trust building, due diligence, valuation, negotiation and contracting
Alliance Management: - Realizing value through the creation and execution of an alliance business plan, organization and governance arrangements
The study surveys companies in the biopharma industry and delivers three tangible outputs:
Fresh thinking - every study builds on the last and new insights are derived every time we run this. One key area of focus is always on what did "outperformers" do that the "underperformers" did not.
Scoring for Companies that participate in the study - Top 5 rankings for each of the three areas we study (Merck and Genentech were the only companies in the 2008 study that made top 5 ranking for all three areas).
Drivers of Alliance Formation - Understanding what motivates interest in a deal. The "Deal on offer", not suprisingly, is the most important; however what else drives the deal?
In preparation for this year's study I have been doing some research and took time to read Stefan Lindegaard's blog. In his most recent posting he responds to an open innovation posting from John Hagel and John Seely Brown. The nugget I really caught onto was at the end of his posting.
He refers to a talk given by Peter Erickson who leads the innovation efforts at General Mills. General Mills have been leaders in the open innovation field along with companies such as P&G (Connect & Develop) and IBM. He writes in his blog "The next practices of open innovation will be about developing systems, enablers, and processes that speed the connection to innovation partners in a repeatable, cost effective, quick way".
Open innovation is not a new practice. In fact Professor Chesbrough first coined the term back in 2003. So my hypothesis is that outperformers in the biopharma industry have mature processes and systems for the operation of their alliances and collaborations.... not just the scouting and deal making aspects.
Therefore in the 2010 study we will aim to evaluate this hypothesis; we will examine the maturity of systems, enablers and processes and see if they are at a level where one could describe them as "repeatable, cost effective, and fast"?
I have been a fan of the collaboratory model since I first learned of it. However I wasn't able to really share a life sciences example. Until this week. IBM, the University of Melbourne and the Victorian government today announced a new IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences, located in Melbourne, Australia. The collaboratory is IBM’s first life sciences collaboratory, and IBM’s first collaboratory in the southern hemisphere. It will use high-performance computing – including IBM’s BlueGene super computer – to advance biological sciences and medical research.
Collaboratory Goals The collaboration is dedicated to dramatic improvements in human health through technology innovation in medical diagnostics, drug discovery and drug design, underpinned by a deep understanding of disease. The collaboratory will use data and high-performance computing to model biological systems in order to accelerate research and treatments for conditions such as cancer and neurological disease.
Scientists from VLSCI and IBM Research will work to accelerate the translation of our fundamental understanding of biology to improvements in medical care and health outcomes, with projects such as:
Medical Imaging and Neuroscience: high performance computers are used to analyse images from the devices such as MRI, PET and the synchrotron.
Clinical Genomics: the identification of combinations of genes implicated in disease and the ability to predict susceptibility to disease and treatment outcome from an individual’s genome and medical history.
Structural Biology: understanding the structure and shape of biological macromolecules, fundamental to pharmaceutical discovery.
Integrated Systems Biology: understanding and modelling the dynamic behaviour of complex systems, from genes, proteins, cells, tissues and organs to organisms.
What is the bottom line?
By bringing computation to medical research, breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment can be achieved much quicker. What may have taken two years or more using traditional computational and wet laboratory techniques can be achieved in a matter of days or weeks.
Nature magazine ended the year with a great article from Bernard Munos of Lilly. His retrospective look at 60 years of innovation in the industry crunches a ton of data and provides some support for beliefs held by many Industry Leaders as well as numerous new perspectives.
The second is also from Nature... 2020 Visions. Gary Pisano (Harvard Business School Professor and author of Science Business) put some pithy views together in an easy read that stimulates the grey matter.
Despite the odd title, the future of IBM's clinical cloud is clear blue!
Linked to this post is an interview that Paul Papas and I did with Kevin Davies. Paul Papas, runs IBM’s life sciences consulting group. Paul started the interview by explaining what IBM means by "smarter" and I included it in the blog here as I think this is a great way to understand the way IBM is thinking about the future in Life Sciences.
Paul Papas: "I’m sure you’ve seen our ‘Smarter Planet’ TV ads. The key message is: the way we live and interact in the world today is unsustainable... To be ‘smarter’ about how we do things we need to implement processes and solutions that are more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Likewise, the way that many life sciences companies operate and perform today is unsustainable. They need to be ‘smarter’ about three things. 1) Innovate smarter, to find new products and therapies to bring to market. 2) Engage smarter, to change how they engage with customers and to figure out their future role in the health care ecosystem. And 3) Operate smarter, change their fundamental operating models and look beyond their four walls to drive maximum efficiency and cost savings. When you think about those things—Innovate smarter, engage smarter, operate smarter—cloud computing is the perfect enabler to operating ‘smarter.’
