This week at Health Datapalooza, a group of medtech and pharma companies traded insights on the strategic partnerships they built with technology companies and what they learned in the process. But they also touched on how they collaborate with startups.
Among the panelists were 23andMe Research Partnerships Manager Carrie Northover; Pfizer’s Head of Corporate Digital Strategy Judy Sewards; Robin Heffernan, CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital spinoff Epidemico; and Otsuka Pharmaceutical U.S. Senior Director of Innovative Data Solutions Pravin Jadhav.
“The easiest thing to do is say no to everything because that way you don’t have to try,” said Jadhav, dryly. The company clearly doesn’t believe that based on its collaboration with Proteus Digital Health and NDA it submitted for the first combined digital health and drug application. It recently received a complete response letter but declined to give an update on its progress addressing questions from the FDA. “Few pharma companies are ready to disrupt the traditional model.”
Asked what their ideal partnering structure is, Northover said it favored co-development. That prompted MedStartr Founder Alex Fair’s question: “How do these companies collaborate with startups? What can a startup do to get your attention, other than ask that question in a setting like this?”
Sewards said, “For us, it is really solving a meaningful problem.” She said startups need to tie together how they can work with a big pharma company like Pfizer to solve that problem together.
Jadhav said, “Our CEO would answer this question like this: Do not come to me with new dashboard ideas.”
That prompted a follow-up question: “How do we know what your problems are?”
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.
Sewards chuckled and said, “It’s not like we’re going to share all our problems with you. But there are a few perennial things, such as: how do we bring new medications to market? How do we do it faster? How do we make sure patients are having the best experience with our medicine? What is the use case? What is the progress we are trying to make?”
Photo: Flickr user Seth Woodworth
