Cleveland Clinic released its top 10 medical innovations that it predicts to be gamechangers in 2015. During today’s conference, a group of 10 Cleveland Clinic doctors spoke on each disease, outlining why they were, indeed, innovative. Here’s some of the commentary around the much-anticipated Top 10:
Given the huge interest in developing a vaccine for Ebola, it’s interesting that the second-ranked innovation is actually an inoculation against Dengue Fever. Known as “break bone fever,” it’s a widespread disease in which only a small portion of folks will die – but a huge number will be infected. Half of the world’s population is at risk of getting infected.
“Without a specific medical treatment, vaccines are what we’re looking toward to control this disease,” said Steven Mawhorter, a Cleveland infectious disease expert. A vaccine’s expected to seek regulatory approval in early 2015, with commercialization slated for the latter half of the year. Love this tweet:
Vaccines for Dengue (aka “break bone fever”) in Top 10 Innovations. Holla global health #MIS2014
— mollypopp (@mollypopp) October 29, 2014
Number three was cost-effective, fast, painless blood testing. Companies like Theranos in the Bay Area are absolutely making waves these days for their novel diagnostic capabilities that reduce the time and blood volume it takes to test for a disease or condition. By only taking a drop or two of blood as opposed to a couple tubes, hospitals can operate in a more cost-effective manner – and patients don’t have to deal with the pain and even anemia that comes from larger diagnostic blood draw volumes. There’s a lot of waste going on, too: “The amount of residual blood left from blood specimens can actually fill several hot tubs in a year,” Cleveland Clinic pathology lead Kandice Marchant said. “This is game-changing technology for lab tests.”
7 billion lab tests in the US every year influencing 70% of medical decisions. Novel blood testing an innovation discussed at #MIS2014 — Dale Shepard MD, PhD (@ShepardDale) October 29, 2014
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Cancer and cardiovascular therapies filled out most of the remaining innovation slots. On the cancer end, this includes radiation therapy for breast cancer that occurs during a lumpectomy – thus reducing the number of visits for a patient post-surgery. This could reduce a patient’s exposure to radiation from four to six weeks to only 30 minutes.
Antibody-drug conjugates in chemotherapy makes the list yet again. Such therapies have been around for more than 30 years, but researchers are getting more lithe with their treatment methods – and with the onset of personalized medicine, this form of cancer therapy will be promising indeed. Same concept goes for checkpoint inhibitors (which should receive three or four approvals next year) – though they’re not brand-new, they’re suddenly showing up as more efficacious.
Behold, a tweet from me:
#MIS2014 Innovation #5 – antibody drug conjugates. Again! Idea around for 30 years, but antibodies better, humanized, understand targets.
— Meghana Keshavan (@meghanakeshavan) October 29, 2014
And here’s a video that succinctly sums up the importance of antibody drug conjugates:
On the cardiovascular side, there’s hope for high-cholesterol patients who don’t respond to statins. A new class of monoclonal antibodies, called PCSK9 inhibitors, are certainly more costly than standard of care – but they’re showing to be highly effective in an important and untreatable patient population. Because with many patients, changing diet doesn’t change blood cholesterol levels. Medication’s the way to go to prevent serious cardiac events down the road.
Another list standout (aren’t they all?) is the leadless cardiac pacemaker, which is 1/10th of the size of a standard pacemaker, and can be implanted in just 13 minutes.
The number one predicted game-changer is the mobile stroke treatment unit. It’s a great concept – connecting neurologists via telemedicine to first-on-the-scene health workers to interpret stroke patterns with immediacy. Cleveland Clinic, itself, deployed its own earlier this year. It’ll be interesting to see how realistic it will be to deploy such a high-cost solution. See Cleveland Clinic’s nifty video outlining its use-case:
Also, here’s a good piece from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about this list.
