LONDON, Nov 19 (APM) - The healthcare industry is on the cusp of a revolution from new technology, with patients at the centre of the changes, a conference heard.
Speaking in a panel discussion at the FT Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology conference in London, Daniel Mahony, fund manager in healthcare at Polar Capital, said: "We are about to experience enormous disruption in healthcare. Disruption will be far bigger than anyone thinks and the patient will be in the middle."
He said previous speakers at the conference on9 Tuesday had spoken of a likely growing trend of monitoring patients by wireless, to avoid them returning to the doctor's surgery or hospitals. But he and other panelists believe, technology will be far more profound.
Kristoffer Famm, vice president bioelectronics R&D at GlaxoSmithKline said the future could involve people having low-power circuits implanted in their body which could identify health problems. Mobile phones would also become much more powerful tools in healthcare and delivery, he said.
This view of radical new innovations was echoed by professor Christopher Toumazou, founder of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College and chief executive of DNA Electronics. He spoke of developing a "lab on a chip" where information could be easily downloaded, but said it was important the regulatory authorities were not allowed to scupper this new technology.
Such a technology could be sold in a "retail environment" in order to reduce the regulatory burden, he said.
Patients will become increasingly empowered by this developing new technology, Mahony believes. Just as phone companies are loathe to discard data, so patients will always keep their own health data.
In this way, he said patients will remain unregulated, with patient-sharing websites increasing. "Patients will collect a lot of data and share it in different ways and that changes the landscape of healthcare in a big way."
Pharma is already embracing high tech companies. Novartis's CEO Joe Jimenez told the conference on Monday its Alcon eyecare division had linked up with Google. He singled out the possibility of developing a set of contact lenses to provide long and short vision.
Mahony on Tuesday said this sort of "multi-disciplinary interaction" was extremely exciting as both parties could soon come up with business ideas they had never previously imagined.
/nh/rs
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