What Will Be Transformative To Facilitating Innovation In Biopharma?

A: TRANSFORMATION IN THE INDUSTRY is happening and at a faster rate than we could have anticipated. New biosensing technologies enable us to address one of the critical bottlenecks in drug R&D — the cost of collecting data, which until recently, was very high and limited. But a whole new set of emerging technologies is reducing these costs to nearly nothing. By outfitting patients with activity trackers and other tiny sensors we can collect millions of data points very quickly (e.g., as much as one gigabyte of data per patient, per hour). Historically we’ve never been able to see, in real time, what is happening inside the patient after taking a drug. While many think it is data that drives innovation, the reality is that it is our ability to collect it accurately, and eventually through the "smartification" of ordinary everyday objects (e.g., car seats) that will prove truly transformative.

BERNARD MUNOS
Bernard is a Senior Fellow at FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, and the founder of the InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation. Previously, he served as advisor in corporate strategy at Eli Lilly focused on disruptive innovation and the radical redesign of the R&D model.