It's why, for example alternative fuel autos might succeed in the U.S. where public transit has not - because they don't require as big a change. People can stay in their car and change their habits less.
Disruptive Technologies Lead to Paradigm Shifts
Nevertheless there are from time-to-time disruptive technologies that do arise which are paradigm-shifting. These are readily (though perhaps not quickly) adopted because the benefits are seen to outweigh the trade-offs and/or effort required to make the change. In many instances there are entire industries built around the pre-existing technologies that foolishly resist such change rather than learn to adopt and adapt. It's the classic mistake of railway companies believing they were in the business of trains rather than transporting people and goods and thus missing the opportunity to dominate transport by road and plane when these industries started to compete for the transport customer.
Will Cell Therapies Disrupt Sufficiently to Shift the Therapeutics Paradigm?
There are a lot of people talking about how regenerative medicine, personalized medicine, and cell therapies are going to revolutionize health care. I'm one of them. There are, however, many good reasons to be skeptical - not the least of which is the sheer size of the industries built around the pharmaceutical model and the power they can exert in resisting change. This might be comparable to Detroit's resistance to alternative transport systems or Houston's resistance to the use of fossil-fuels. It's massive.
But just as Detroit is now embracing the need for change and Houston is touting alternative energies, could it be that New Jersey is having its own 'come-to-Jesus' moment and realizing there may be - perhaps must be - a future for pharma beyond the blockbuster pill model? The other big 'industry' to convince is the healthcare inudstry. How readily will hospitals and doctors adapt to a therapeutics paradigm shift?
Last week, I had an interesting conversation with someone from a struggling cell therapy company that has completed a semi-successful phase II trial and is very quickly running out of money despite having been on a road show for over a year. They are engaged in a "number" of "partnering" discussions with pharma companies who understand the science, the manufacturing, and the cost-of-goods data but say they are still uncomfortable with the "business model for cell therapy."
The know the market, have good data on the COGs and can assume a certain product price and reimbursement...so what's left? I'm told that "business model" is code - at least in this instance - for two concerns:
(1) what will clinical adoption rates be like, i.e., will doctors adopt these new therapies and, if so, at what rate? and
(2) the model they are being presented does not offer them the type of margins they've come to expect.
Let's look at each of these in turn.
Health 2.0
Doctors have traditionally been driven by clinical results and reimbursement. But there's a new driver in town - it's the informed patient and their participation in Health 2.0. Patients no longer rely solely on their physician for healthcare information.
Deputy Editor of Wired magazine, Thomas Goetz, author of "The Decision Tree" (blog and upcoming book), describes this new era of healthcare as follows:
"We are entering a Third Phase of medicine - one that spots disease and illness based on risks rather than one that responds to symptoms (phase 1, from pre-history to the mid 19th c), or one that seeks out the causes (phase 2, from circa-1850 to just about now).For better or for worse, patients have an increasing multitude of sources and options. Not only are patients now much more informed of their diagnoses and conditions but also of their treatment alternatives. More each year are demonstrating a willingness to access cell-based treatments out-of-country. Others are lobbying for the loosening of the regulatory sphincter around cell-based therapies such as stem cell transplantation, Dendreon's PROVENGE, etc.
These three phases closely parallel our technological capacity to spot disease: Phase 1 was primed to spot symptoms because humans relied on our senses - and nothing more - to recognize illness. If we couldn’t see it (or smell it), it wasn’t yet evident. Phase 2 emerged with the perfection of the microscope and the discovery of the germ theory of disease: finally we could see disease in its pathogenic form - bacteria, mostly - and thus began a race to find the little buggers that were causing disease. The late 19th century saw a flurry of diagnosis, as the cause of one disease after another was identified, and the Pasteurs and Kochs went about devising antibodies or vaccines to vanquish them... So now this third phase dovetails with the bevy of new diagnostics emerging - devices and techniques that look for certain molecules and DNA strands to not only detect the presence of disease, but predispositions towards certain conditions as well...
This third phase contains elements of what many are calling “personalized medicine,” but I hate that term - it sounds too servicey and implies that this is simply regular medicine/clinical practice that’s been tailored for you, as if we have a computer watching our health (it’s “personalized!”).
To my mind, what’s happening now is much more than simply a move to personalization; it’s an entirely new way of relating to disease and illness, one that’s as impactful and as new as the realization that germs - not bad air or bad luck - caused disease. What’s happening now makes disease/illness an optional state, one that can be opted out of (ideally) or engineered against (more likely)."
This is, he says, "...a new phase of health and medical care, where more decisions are being made by individuals on their own behalf, rather than by physicians, and that, furthermore, these decisions are being informed by new tools based on statistics, data, and predictions. This is a good thing - it will let us, the general public, live better, happier, and even longer lives. But it will require us to be stewards of our health in ways we may not be prepared for. We will act on the basis of risk factors and predictive scores, rather than on conventional wisdom and doctors recommendations.
We will act in collaboration with others, drawing on collective experience with health and disease, rather than in the isolation and ignorance that can come with “privacy” concerns. And we will act early, well before symptoms appear, opting to tap the science of genomics and proteomics in order to mitigate our risks down the road.
Together, these tools will create a new opportunity and a new responsibility for people to act - to make health decisions well before they become patients. This can be characterized as a decision tree, a series of informed choices we will make to minimize uncertainty and optimize our outcomes. Indeed, we will use decision trees to navigate most of our health decisions, sometimes in overt ways - new decision support tools will both inform us and guide us, and they’ll be steeped in statistics, prediction, and the power of collective experience.”
Increasingly patients' demands are influencing doctors as much or more than anything else. Pricewaterhouse Coopers recently listed "the internet and social network" as the Health Industry's "top nine issues for 2009" citing web2.0 as "changing how healthcare is navigated and experienced by consumers".
It remains to be seen how doctors will adopt cell therapies and this will depend in large part on the adequacy of reimbursement but certainly patients are driving their doctor's decisions like never before and patients seem enthused - perhaps even overly so - about cell-based therapies.
Therapeutic Profit Margins
In terms of margins, even pharma executives are now realizing - in the face of diminishing pipelines and massive R&D costs per drug - that the models that have worked so well to-date financed by the kinds of margins they have received to-date may not be possible going forward. M&A, the creation of decentralized divisions, increased academic collaborations, etc.... they are all measures to try and address the same problem of diminishing margins.
Decreasing product margins are being tackled like it's the disease when at least some would suggest it's the symptom. The disease may not be lower margins at all but the model which demands such massive margins to succeed. But more on that in just a minute...
Personalized Medicine
I believe there is a third challenge to pharma's "business model" concerns. From one direction we have pharma's increasing desperation for new therapeutics; from another direction comes the public's increasing demand for access to cell-based therapies, and - to complete the trifecta - we have the fast-growing sector(s) of personal genomics, theragnostics, and/or personalized medicine.
The ability to analyze the effects of therapeutics on patient sub-populations and use that to target such groups and/or tailor therapeutics accordingly opens up so many promises therapeutically but also puts incredible additional pressures on the blockbuster model with its low-rate of success per overall prescription rate. Some insurers are now catching on to the notion that reimbursement can be - perhaps should be - tied to therapeutic success and are willing to pay a higher price tag for success but nothing at all for failure.
Others before me have described the increasingly hard-to-ignore crack in the blockbuster model much better than I. One of the better analyses I've read recently can be read here.
To predict that cell-based therapies will contribute to and succeed because of a shift in the healthcare paradigm may not be that much of a stretch at all. The stars do appear to be aligning for a rather wholesale change to be readily adopted by all involved - or at least the major players.
...
(click here to continue to Part II)
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