Image via WikipediaIt is unlikely that I will be able to attend the Health 2.0 conference this year, but there are definitely some rather interesting talks this year, as highlighted on the Health 2.0 blog. Looking at the lineup though reminded me of a discussion I had with a big pharma CIO a few years ago. He had just given a talk about clinical data integration and I was picking his brains on genomic data. He told me that he wanted to bring genomic data into the company’s clinical data pipelines but didn’t really have a good idea of how they were going to do it.
We talk a lot about Health 2.0 in the social health or crowd sourced context, but what about the future of medicine, the therapies that will guide our future? For the better part, some of the real challenges of all the data we have today, with the inherent noise, the lack of clear success stories, the complex standards, the lack of standardization of statistical methods, etc, are not being discussed as they should be. We are in need of some serious technological innovation in the informatics and biosimulation side of things, as well as in developing appropriate strategies and best practices for trial design.
It’s fascinating to see some of the approaches companies are taking in evolving their research strategies, with an emphasis on getting human samples early, and ideally doing some proof of concept studies. There are all kinds of efforts going on as well; in developing clinical data standards, in translational medicine, in building biobanks and population selection, etc., but from what I can tell they tend to (with exceptions) fall into two buckets. Either they are overly complex, the kind of efforts doomed to sit in committee for years, or haphazard, doomed to stay proof of concept for a long time.
Where am I going with this? We have conferences about the next generation of health information technology, blogs that discuss the underlying topics to death, but we seem to have very little public discussion, even the very conceptual, geeky variety, about how we can change the way drugs are developed, and little open innovation, the kind that comes from a disruptive player or trends. There have been disruptive technologies, disruptive drugs, but as far as I can tell, no company that just changes the game on its head, at least not in a long time. Why is that? Is it the heavily regulated nature of the biopharma industry? For sure. Is it the inability of the “post-genomic” era to bear any obvious fruit? Partly. But I think there’s something systematic. No system-busting mavericks that challenge the very structure and business models that have been around for so long. No process changes that allows a company to develop a drug relatively fast, and with minimal attrition and with a companion diagnostic to boot. Whatever it is, we need that disruptor, perhaps a Black Swanevent. The “2.0″ label is an overused, and often misused, cliche today, but I would love to see a medicine 2.0 conference, one where we talk about innovative business models and technologies that will revolutionize not just data production, but the very results that we derive from the plethora of data that we have.
Except that when I refer to Medicine 2.0, I don't mean using Web 2.0 tools for medicine, but rather the next era of how we tackle drug discovery and development
Wanted: Disruptor
We talk a lot about Health 2.0 in the social health or crowd sourced context, but what about the future of medicine, the therapies that will guide our future? For the better part, some of the real challenges of all the data we have today, with the inherent noise, the lack of clear success stories, the complex standards, the lack of standardization of statistical methods, etc, are not being discussed as they should be. We are in need of some serious technological innovation in the informatics and biosimulation side of things, as well as in developing appropriate strategies and best practices for trial design.
It’s fascinating to see some of the approaches companies are taking in evolving their research strategies, with an emphasis on getting human samples early, and ideally doing some proof of concept studies. There are all kinds of efforts going on as well; in developing clinical data standards, in translational medicine, in building biobanks and population selection, etc., but from what I can tell they tend to (with exceptions) fall into two buckets. Either they are overly complex, the kind of efforts doomed to sit in committee for years, or haphazard, doomed to stay proof of concept for a long time.
Where am I going with this? We have conferences about the next generation of health information technology, blogs that discuss the underlying topics to death, but we seem to have very little public discussion, even the very conceptual, geeky variety, about how we can change the way drugs are developed, and little open innovation, the kind that comes from a disruptive player or trends. There have been disruptive technologies, disruptive drugs, but as far as I can tell, no company that just changes the game on its head, at least not in a long time. Why is that? Is it the heavily regulated nature of the biopharma industry? For sure. Is it the inability of the “post-genomic” era to bear any obvious fruit? Partly. But I think there’s something systematic. No system-busting mavericks that challenge the very structure and business models that have been around for so long. No process changes that allows a company to develop a drug relatively fast, and with minimal attrition and with a companion diagnostic to boot. Whatever it is, we need that disruptor, perhaps a Black Swan event. The “2.0″ label is an overused, and often misused, cliche today, but I would love to see a medicine 2.0 conference, one where we talk about innovative business models and technologies that will revolutionize not just data production, but the very results that we derive from the plethora of data that we have.