Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2021 - 30

TECH, HEALTHCARE, & PHARMA
them to see how does this change the safety and efficacy of the
product or service that you're putting out there? Obviously it
takes a whole other team composition to be able to navigate
the difference in mindset. That's why I always recommend to
say, 'Hey, do you have someone on the team that understands
these languages, or at least has spent some time in it?' "
Kim said that while tech folks may feel stymied by some of the
rules of the pharma world-like not changing the parameters
of a clinical trial midway through-pharma equally may take
umbrage at the tech side and object that " they can't do that! "
So where's the common ground? And what's the incentive to
partner? In Kim's mind, the answers lie in data and intellectual
property. Pharma is now constantly generating tons of patient
data via clinical trials and post-approval real world evidence,
and the tech sector is extremely interested in that data and
what it could do: monetizing it by creating technologies that
can track progression of disease to see if the drug or other
intervention is working or not.
" The common ground is the mutual understanding of data's
importance in the patient journey, " Kim said. " For pharma,
clinical trials generate data under the controlled environment;
the data is then polished to seek regulatory approval and reimbursement
decisions. For tech companies, data is captured
through various means-sensors, wearables, smartphones-
to understand users' behaviors and actions in the real world.
" The common ground is the
mutual understanding of data's
importance in the patient journey. "
" Once we make sense of the data, so what? We've collected all
this, you've shown me some interesting stuff, so what do I need
to change in my day-to-day life? For pharma it's making drugs;
for us it's making digital therapeutics. In traditional medicine,
we only see snapshots of the patient's health in clinical visits.
When coupled with digital health technologies, we can now
capture a continuous, more complete picture of the patient's
health that can help us make better, more informed interventions
to prevent, manage, and treat a disease. Through the
partnership between pharma and tech, we are able to better
serve our patients by promoting real-world-data-driven medicine.
And that's the important hallmark that we share between
these two industries. "
The Data Explosion
The importance and value of data, and the vast amount of
it being generated by healthcare and pharma, also figures
prominently in the thinking of Christine Wolff, vice president
of Americas alliances for PTC. She formerly worked at
Dell, among other tech roles, and more recently consulted
to Seagate, where she helped advise the company on its own
entry into the healthcare space.
" Healthcare is driving data growth at a faster rate than almost
anything in the world, and when we think of where the data
is from an IT perspective, we tend to think about hospital
systems, or imaging systems generating big data files, " Wolff
said. " But the expense of sequencing the human genome has
come down so dramatically in recent years that it's made
genomics affordable even in a retail setting. There's been an
explosion of different types of '-omics,' and these sequences
are generating massive amounts of data. "
" Healthcare is driving data
growth at a faster rate than
almost anything in the world. "
Changing trends in medicine, as well as cutting-edge technologies,
are also driving the convergence of the tech and healthcare/pharma
worlds, according to Wolff.
" For pharma companies, it used to be that they wanted to own
the blockbuster drug. Now they're moving [to] what they call
personalization of medicine. We started with precision medicine,
where you had the best, gold-standard approach to a
particular diagnosis. Now they want to personalize that to the
particular individual. So rather than owning the blockbuster
category, with systemic risk of the blockbusters coming in and
out of patent control, they want to own the patient over their
life cycle-and IT people have learned tremendous amounts
around how to handle life cycle events over an extended
period of time. With the advent of open systems, very cheap
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Strategic Alliance QUARTERLY | Q3 2021
Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2021
