Hicham Naim, Global Head, Integrated & Personalized Patient Care Program, Digital Advisory Board at Takeda & Founder of Curated Health, joined me for a wide-ranging discussion around digital medicine & biomarkers, outcomes-based business models, Software as a Medical Device, digital transformation in Pharma, and much more.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: One of the opportunities really has to do with the start of decentralized trials and the ability for us to capture data in a way that was never possible before using things like sensors and ambient biometrics. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts about potentially leveraging that as a lynchpin, if you will, to a lot more around how discovery is going to happen in the pharmaceutical industry.
A: This one has potential. What has happened in COVID-19 is that one of the issues we had whether it’s Takeda or any other pharma, we had to stop many clinical trials because the healthcare system had to prioritize treating patients with COVID.
The value of using decentralized clinical trials and those new technologies is that first, you can start doing those in a more decentralized way. You can collect the data more efficiently but also find insight that you couldn’t find before. Most of the trials today are still using paper-based, which is a bit fabricated. The value of a decentralized clinical trial is that it will make it more efficient and more effective.
You talked about NFTs, maybe the patient will own those NFTs, own their own data, whether it’s a blood test or a genetic test, and maybe pharma could pay them back for those NFTs. Imagine the future where we go and build clinical trials where pharma and others could buy those NFTs from healthy populations and use that to fund them. Those healthy populations can then buy futures for any potential drugs that can be developed in the future. For instance, in your family, you have a disease and you don’t know if you will have it when you turn 40, if it’s a chronic disease. You might buy some futures for a potential drug or therapy that can be a benefit for you 30 or 40 years from now.
It’s still science fiction. I don’t know if it will happen but many things that we thought won’t happen like going to the moon or even having the first tourist. Who would have imagined that 50 years ago?
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Hicham Naim, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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