Pharma's 2019 Q2 saw several clinical trial, medication management partnerships

Diving deeper into digital, this quarter the pharma giants have continued to implement new tools to enhance clinical trials, support medication management with technology and partner in developing digital therapeutics.

Onc, a foreign entity to this established industry, pharma executives are now becoming better versed in working with digital health companies and sharing the lessons they’ve learned.

“It’s not partnerships of pharma versus [digital] but a partnership of equals,” Erik Janssen, VP of innovative solutions in neurology at UCB Biopharma, said at HIMSS Europe last month. “It is about collaboration, and it is about learning a different perspective of the complexity of healthcare as well. It is also about improvisation … You must be agile. It is also about sustainability.”

While Janssen and others have encouraged partnerships between the two worlds, others have pointed out the challenges.

“The number one [risk to pharma] is just the complexity of developing these technologies,” Dr. Ameet Nathwani, chief medical officer and chief digital officer at Sanofi, said at BIO 2019 in Philadelphia. “Just imagine, when you develop a biologic drug and you make a slight modification, you have to go through this whole process. Just imagine that in the software world, where software changes over time. What’s the IP of it, can you IP a software? Well, actually, the regulations are not that clear and so there’s software’s copyright, and then what’s the generic version of it?”