Event impressions - DxPx EU Conference

During this fireside discussion, Ruedi Stoffel described Roche’s long terms vision in terms of diagnostic technologies. Their goal is to use diagnostics and its respective technologies as a first step towards more holistic an improved disease management. Starting with diagnostics to deliver medical value on integrated testing solutions, we can progress to confident healthcare solutions, particularly with the use of algorithms. Finally, this should lead to disease management solutions, which improve care along patient journeys.

This talk highlighted that developing promising technologies is not sufficient for successful outcomes; to bring good customer solutions, there is much more work involved. Furthermore, the amount of work that needs to be done from a market access and commercial point of view is often underestimated. Indeed, the healthcare is quite distributed: physicians buy, insurance pays, and patients receive. This creates unique challenges compared to other sectors.

These issues also underscored the importance of and need for partnerships, particularly in the field of diagnostics. It can sometimes be difficult to find good matches, especially when a big player partners with a much smaller new-comer; two key points were mentioned in this respect:

Quality systems: for established companies, this risk profile is inherently different that for start-ups. Indeed, while small companies have very little to lose and much to gain, renowned companies have much more to lose, and are not willing to risk their name for technologies of questionable quality.

Cultural aspects: successful partnerships rely on shared philosophies and goals; cultural aspects play an important role in this respect.

Finally, some valuable advice was given to startups: developing outstanding technologies is a good start, but for ultimate success, the focus should be on what applications a technology has. How valuable is the information a new technology can provide to physicians to help them make informed decisions?

This fireside chat focused mainly on the booming of the digital health space, and investments in companies that are part of this market. The digital health market is of great interest, particularly in diagnostics, as the technologies in this space are excellent enablers of patient outcome improvement, which is the long-term goal investors look for when choosing which companies to invest in.

The question of big tech’s role within the digital health space was raised: when will it enter the health market? According to the speakers, big tech is already playing an important role in this market, especially in the consumer space (wearables for example). Indeed, they already own two key elements: the medium, i.e. the devices and technologies required to manufacture them, as well as the cloud infrastructure, key to the generation of large amounts of data, as is the case for the healthcare system.

This puts big pharma in a challenging position, as they no longer are the main players in their own sector. One possibility would be for them to enter the software space themselves, just as tech companies have entered the healthcare space. Interestingly however, most pharma companies are quite resistant to this idea, as they do not believe that would be worth the investment. Instead, pharma is leaning towards partnerships with tech companies; many of them already use technologies from the big tech sector.

The discussion ended with some advice from the investors for start-ups in the digital health space. According to them, there are four main take-aways:

What problem are you solving? The value proposition of the company must be made extremely clear.
Once the outcome of the company is provided, building a case for a reimbursement scheme should be a top priority.
The technology should be centered around patients and patient-outcomes.
Know the quality of your company’s data!

Pitch Award Company Profiles

In order of appearance

ThinkSono: a company dedicated to democratizing ultrasound, and making usable by medical staff with little to no expertise. Specifically, they have developed an ultrasound user platform to detect deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the number one cause of preventable hospital-related deaths. With their workflow, ThinkSono saves valuable time by enabling quick diagnoses for patients.

Fertigo Medical: committed to improving IVF outcome with continuous in vivo monitoring. Currently, only around 30% of IVFs are successful: this is mainly due to how difficult it is to identify the window of opportunity for each woman. Fertigo Medical has developed a mini-probe for the in vivo monitoring of what they call “uterus readiness”, capable of delivering high resolution images of the endometrium’s surface morphology over the course of the cycle.

Dermagnostix: develops a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip diagnostic tool for dermatological diagnostics. Dermatology is a field of medicine that has lagged behind in the area of molecular diagnostics; most conditions are diagnosed by eye by a medical doctor or via histology. This is not only time-consuming and inefficient, it also costly and often inaccurate. To properly diagnose skin conditions, complex molecular assays are required; currently, this is not feasible with the scale of patients in dermatology. Dermagnostix solves all of these problem with their non-invasive device, capable of performing screening assays for over 40 targets in under one hour.

Alertgy: provides the first real-time, non-invasive blood glucose monitoring solution for diabetics. In the form of a wearable device, easily combinable with current smart watches, it utilizes dielectric spectroscopy to analyze both glucose and insulin directly in the blood.

Ananda: a company that aims to improve drug delivery for neurological disorders by growing mini neuronal networks on chips. These networks are unique, as they are the only ones to fully mimic the architecture they would have in the human brain. They solve a crucial problem in the field of neurology: the lack of an adequate model. Indeed, no animal model comes close to modeling the human brain, and in vitro neuronal networks are difficult to reproduce. Ananda deliver a product that functions as a model for human neurological disorders, and greatly facilitates drug development in this area.

Miwendo Solutions: Miwendo solutions has developed the only device capable of performing a colonoscopy with a 360° view of the colon while also enabling automatic detection (via a sound prompt) of polyps during the assessment. This offers unique possibilities for diagnosis of colon cancer, a disease that immensely benefits from being detected early.

Irubis: Irubis develops a monitoring device of critical process parameters in bioprocessing of biopharmaceutical products. It provides continuous monitoring of glucose and lactate, key metabolites in cell culture. Its unique feature is the use of an external flow-cell, which is a single-use component; this is a highly desirable characteristic in analytical tools, particularly in the CGT field, where contamination avoidance is key.

DasLab: das lab provides the largest digital lab test infrastructure providing universal access to the highest quality of diagnostics. It provides simple, flexible and confidential digital workflows for medical tests and vaccinations, designed for patients, doctors, and laboratories.

lino Biotech AG

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