It's that time when we start to look ahead to what next year holds for the life science sector...Lu Rahman outlines 2020's big medtech players
AI and machine learning.
A decade ago the healthcare advances create by AI would have seemed the stuff of dreams. But back in 2018 Theresa May announced plans to use artificial intelligence and data to transform the way certain diseases like cancer.
The technology is moving at a pace – this year we heard that a team led by the University of Surrey had filed the first ever patent for inventions autonomously created by AI without a human inventor.
Professor Ryan Abbott explained the implications this had for the life science sector: “These filings are important to any area of research and development as well as any area that relies on patents. Patents are more important in the life sciences than in many other areas, particularly for drug discovery. AI has also been used extensively in the drug discovery process for a long time for tasks like screening of compounds and in silico analysis. These tasks can be the foundation for patent filings.
“As AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is likely to play an increasing role in R&D including in the life sciences. It is an exciting prospect that AI may be able to improve the efficiency of some historically very inefficient practices. Pharma and tech companies are likely to develop AI to automate more and more of the drug discovery process.”
According to Geoff Twist, managing director for Roche Diagnostics UK and Ireland, the time has come to put AI at the heart of the NHS. He believes that AI “can help healthcare professionals transform the NHS”.
With prime minister Boris Johnson announcing that £250 million will be used to set up a national AI laboratory, Twist sees this as a sign of things to come and that, “AI presents an opportunity to help alleviate some of the pressure, while also offering potential for groundbreaking revolution in what healthcare can do”.
This is something in which Roche Diagnostics has significant experience.
“Developing AI solutions that can free up staff to care for patients, and improving detection of diseases is something we are truly passionate about. For example, we are proud to be part of a pioneering collaborative effort, the Northern Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC) in Leeds, which has been given funding by the UK government’s innovation funding agency, Innovate UK, to bring together the NHS and academia to pioneer the use of AI in digital pathology. This funding will be combined with £7 million that the industry partners, including Roche, have committed to invest,” Twist told MTI News.
It's all about 5G
We’re hearing more and more about the impact of 5G on the medtech sector.
According to ABI Research, a global tech market advisory firm, by 2026, there will be 5.3 million 5G connections on the factory floor which will generate a revenue of more than $184 million (with a CAGR of 623% between 2021 and 2026).
Leo Gegs, research analyst at ABI Research, said: “As a technology, 5G will be a perfect fit to provide wireless connectivity on the factory floor, since it enables, for example, establishing a massive wireless sensor network or implementing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications for predictive maintenance and product monitoring. Therefore, 5G offers immense operational benefits and productivity enhancements to the implementing manufacturer. Furthermore, the technology opens up new production opportunities by enabling artificial intelligence applications to be integrated into manufacturing processes.
“It is, therefore, highly important for network operators and infrastructure vendors to develop new business strategies taking into manufacturers’ requirements. Centrally, this should include moving away from selling connectivity as such and develop attractive pricing models for additional network capabilities.”
Earlier this year we saw IoT firm Pangea, team up with Kingston University for a 5G project to help speed up triage appointments.
The two organisations have collaborated to develop enriched video compression and data transfer techniques over 4G+ and 5G networks, with the aim of medical staff using ambulance streams to triage patients before reaching A&E – with the aim of reducing pressures on that hospital department and improving response time.
Pangea’s MD Dan Cunliffe said: “We’re proud to be at the forefront of the push for 5G. By combining our connectivity, commercial expertise, and Channel access with the power and knowledge of Kingston University’s academics, along with access to its 5G testbed, we’ll pave the way for data transferal over powerful 5G networks.
“We’re excited to embark on this journey alongside Kingston University, and we’re privileged to have the opportunity to develop such incredible technology.”
Healthtech - what else?
For medtech players designing and manufacturing healthtech products, there are significant opportunities on the horizon. With the NHS continuing its drive for increased innovation, the conditions are being created to help manufacturers take advantage of the growth of healthtech in the UK.
Of course, making innovative healthcare solutions is nothing new to the medtech sector, so where is the opportunity? Earlier this year NHS revealed its Long Term Plan. Its aim is to speed up the route by which innovation reaches the patient. Crucial to the plan is the role of the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) – the link between academia, industry and the NHS – who have been guaranteed funding until 2023 to get innovations to patients as quickly as possible.
Also playing a fundamental role is the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC). Set up in 2016, the AAC ‘brings industry, government and the NHS together to remove barriers to the uptake of innovations. This enables NHS patients to have faster access to innovations that can transform care’. The remit of the AAC has now stepped up with an over-arching function across the entire UK health innovation network, ‘providing more joined-up support for innovators and setting the strategy for innovation in the health system’.
The AAC identifies and supports innovation that it feels will have the ’biggest impact on patient health outcomes and NHS services’. These include medical technologies, digital products and diagnostic products. Using a range of platforms, such as HealthTechConnect and UK Pharma Scan, businesses can register their products – if the AAC sees significant potential they will receive guidance from the AAC on how to get to both market and NHS patients, as quickly as possible.
Pharma goes digital
Yes that’s nothing new but the changing relationship between big pharma and digital technology is worth paying attention to. As Novartis teamed up with Microsoft, an important step was taken in the way big pharma thinks about finding new drugs with the help of data.
The Novartis AI innovation lab with Microsoft as its strategic AI and data-science partner, aims to significantly bolster Novartis AI capabilities from research through commercialisation and help accelerate the discovery and development of transformative medicines for patients worldwide.
We also heard that Emma Walmsley, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, had joined the Microsoft board highlighting the relationship between the two industries. While the benefits of data in focussed clinical trials becomes increasingly understood, using AI to find new drugs and treatments is gaining ground.
Panna Sharma, CEO of Lantern Pharma explained how the company wanted to discover new ways to use precision medicine and biomarkers to rescue cancer drugs that had failed in late stage trials. Oncology continues to remain pharma’s biggest market but its success in clinical trials can be devastatingly low.
He says that Lantern Pharma decided on a different approach to clinical trials; one that would involve using artificial intelligence (AI) and biomarker signatures to understand how patients respond to specific drug classes. An AI platform - ‘RADR’ – was developed.
“I really thought that this was a company that could be a game changer because they weren’t just a technology and service provider, they were also biotech,” Sharma says.
RADR - which stands for Response Algorithm for Drug Positioning & Rescue – works by leveraging big data and genomics to analyse millions of data points from clinical trials to determine how drugs will work with tumour samples. What this means for clinical trials is that RADR is able to identify patients that will respond better to certain therapies, ultimately de-risking trials for drug development companies.
“The platform today can very exquisitely tease out who’s going to respond and who’s not going to respond and generate a fairly, smart, practical, genetic signature. And we get that genetic signature from all the way down from the 20,000 genes, to 2,000, to 20-50,” Sharma explains.
Whilst RADR sounds impressive, Sharma says the platform is only a fragment of what the company is wanting it to be. The platform currently holds around 100 million data points of specific drug tumour interactions, but the company wants it to be bigger - much bigger.
“Our goal is to be at about 300+ million [data points] next year, a billion the year after. At that point it’ll be a fairly unique platform. We’ll be able to not only understand which patients respond to the majority of drug classes, but we’ll also be able to start identifying which combinations of drugs can work best in different tumour dynamics.”
