Accelerating Innovation in Healthcare
What will we see in healthcare in the year ahead?
As I approached my 3rd anniversary at Health Market Experts, I wondered, What will we see in healthcare in the year ahead that is new? Then I realized a year is not enough time. The pace of change in healthcare can be glacial! Especially when it comes to new technologies or innovative health policies. Many of our strategic assessments look at a 5- or 10-year horizon.
So I started thinking about trends that may not be new but are gaining momentum. I’m calling these “MEdA Trends.” They are characterized by having a Major impact, Evolving over decades, and Accelerating.
In an occasional article, I’ll discuss MEdA Trends that increasingly will shape our healthcare landscape, define market opportunities, and influence decision making for those who work in strategy, business development, marketing, commercial operations, and more.
Trend #1 Faster innovation with platform technologies
1.1. What to expect: From F100 leaders in science and technology to visionary start-ups, addressing unmet needs in healthcare traditionally has taken years if not decades. But the pace of change in some areas will accelerate over the next 10+ years.
1.2. Established companies are embracing bio platforms for innovation: mRNA technology is one example of a platform technology. With increased reliance on platforms, innovators aren’t starting from scratch with each program. Development timelines will shrink for new vaccines, diagnostics, or therapies that leverage platforms like mRNA for vaccines and treatments, cell therapy such as CAR-T, and gene therapy, including different vectors and gene editing techniques like CRISPR.
1.3. Why it’s a MEdA Trend? As a result of bio platforms, we’re actually seeing two distinct phases of innovation: the creation of a platform followed by the use of that platform and its adaptation and evolution to address new challenges.
1.4 Examples: mRNA, Gene Therapy, and Other Platforms. For example, mRNA technology has been around for decades. While mRNA became a household name only recently -- and was a focus public health, public policy, and politics -- as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA technology is not new.
What’s new is the use of mRNA to develop vaccines in months rather than using traditional methods, which took years. Further, the same technology can be used effectively to target and combat variants that arise. So when the target virus evolves, we are able to keep apace by innovating on top of our platform solutions.
In a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health article, The Long History of mRNA Vaccines, chris beyrer reminds us that we first began testing mRNA vaccines in the 1990s. Similarly, the The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reminds us that COVID-19 vaccines were “decades in the making,” since the discovery of RNA in 1961.
Gene therapy is another MEdA Trend. It too has been evolving for decades and recently has shown signs of accelerating. Gene therapy offers the ability to add, replace, or edit our genetic to address the underlying cause of disease and can provide a cure to disease. The idea is old; the applications are newer.
The concept of gene therapy goes back to the 1960s and 1970s. The American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT Staff) provides a useful review of progress, as does this overview from the Japan Neurological Society (2020). FDA approved the first gene therapy in the US in 2017, to treat ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia). A handful of gene therapies have been approved in recent years addressing neuromuscular disease, blindness, and cancer. Recent include DMD (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) and beta-thalassemia. Here is a list from the FDA of approved cellular and gene therapy products.
Meanwhile, next-generation editing technologies like CRISPR are emerging, as Karen Bulaklak, Ph.D. and Charles Gersbach point out in Nature (2020). And multiple techniques are in play: some are in vivo (in the body), others are ex vivo (where cells are removed from the body, treated, and returned).
Development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and therapies based on bioplatforms, like mRNA or gene therapy, does not start from scratch – it builds on prior knowledge, experience, and success with a platform and process. Launching these new technologies requires an understanding of the dynamic landscape they will enter. Market Research and Market Access are critical to creating an effective strategy so that physicians and their patients will benefit from these advances.
The pace of innovation will increase, as scientists leverage existing platforms and develop new platforms. Collectively, these platforms can be used to address myriad health issues, some of which we may not even be aware of yet.
What platform technologies do you anticipate will make a positive difference in our health and healthcare?