by Thomas Meek at the TOPRA annual symposium
AMSTERDAM, Sep 29 (APM) - Medical apps and related technology can help move the industry towards developing "true precision medicine", said AstraZeneca's Matthew Bonam on Thursday.
Bonam, who is project director, intelligent pharmaceuticals at the pharma company, told a conference that smartphone tools and wearables could lead to more personalised treatments for patients, depending on their individual needs and wants.
He gave the example of being able to work out the most effective dosing regimen for a patient based on monitoring their treatment, rather than relying on the dosing regimens determined in early-stage trials.
"This kind of technology can take us to a point where there is the potential for individualised dosing, so we stop dosing based on the dose that comes out a Phase IIb trial - you are actually dosing based on how a patient is responding to treatment, both metabolising that treatment and their active condition," said Bonam, who was speaking at the TOPRA symposium in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
"We are seeing elements of this now in the way that some people are starting to work with insulin."
Bonam said it was critical to link the information that can be obtained and provided by different technologies with behavioural science to communicate to people individually based on their needs and develop highly personalised patient support programmes.
This includes patient profiling in order to develop different styles and designs of technology for patients to engage with and to work out what is the best approach for each patient, depending on how they feel about their condition and their treatment.
"The way you remind a patient about taking a medication really has to be driven by what that patient thinks about their medication," said Bonam. "If a patient thinks that medication is the only thing they need to save their life, that's a very different conversation to a patient who's not even sure they've got the condition they've been diagnosed with and isn't sure the drug is having any benefit."
This knowledge, coupled with technology that can help healthcare professionals understand both the acute and chronic status of a person's condition, can then be used to develop personalised care plans and goals, said Bonam.
And Bonam is confident the use of these types of care plan, supported by new technologies, can have a positive effect on patient outcomes.
"The beauty of digital health is you are able to collect data consistently and constantly from people. And so if you are able to monitor and assess and then support, you are able to then have an impact on clinical outcome."
Bonam gave the example of Sivan Innovation as a company that is already showing the benefits of this type of approach in lung cancer patients.
Sivan developed an app - classified as a medical device - for patients that allows them to easily report side effects and symptoms of disease progress. This has been tested in a clinical trial of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and has demonstrated an improvement in overall survival of seven months compared with patients not using the app, said Bonam.
He explained that this was down to disease progression being detected earlier, patients being in a better physical state when these progressions are detected and patients being able to have biopsies to work out the right therapies to take.
"If you want one message to what digital health can do, it can improve overall survival by seven months in patients with non-small cell lung cancer".
When it comes to investing in these new technologies and convincing payers they are worth paying for, Bonam said there is added value across the system.
For patients, they will be able to take more control over their condition, said Bonam.
The benefits for the healthcare system and payers include the potential for improved adherence to medicines and being able to diagnose changes in conditions earlier.
"That will have a massive impact for payers," said Bonam.
And for pharma companies such AZN, it helps them differentiate what they do, and they can use the data collected to support drug development and identify new targets and new ways of supporting patients.
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