Society is at the beginning of one of the most fundamental shifts in at least 100 years. In many sectors, innovation has been accelerating as a result of digital technology. Substantial value is being realized from well-proven analog assets now delivered using mobile technology – digital music, digital commerce, digital finance are a few examples. New intellectual property and competitive barriers to protect these innovative approaches are being developed at a high rate. The profit potential is large.
In contrast, for over 50 years pharmaceutical R&D productivity and innovation capacity has been structurally declining. This problem is being compounded by increasing market access challenges for novel products that must compete with excellent established, analog medicines.
Digital medicines are drugs that when ingested communicate to a consumer’s mobile device and report the time of ingestion, along with accurate metrics of activities of daily life collected by a wearable patch and communicated using the patient’s mobile device. Digital medicine solutions engage patients, families and providers, delivering accurate feedback that enhances trust, improves collaboration and delivers much better, personalized outcomes.
Digital medicine solutions have been proven in both RCTs and commercial implementations to not only improve outcomes, but also to enable expanded access to care and faster innovation in areas of medicine with global pandemics and few novel products in the pipeline.
Proteus Digital Health CEO Andrew Thompson has explained why this new category – digital medicines – is a sector that will generate revenues of $100B within ten years, and within 30 years why every drug in the world will be a digital medicine.