Muema At The Technology Precision Health Summit
by Muema Lombe
Muema At The Precision Health Conference
Today I’m pleased to welcome Muema Lombe, a new voice at MAPping Company Success. He’ll be sharing news from conferences and interviews with founders.
Health 2.0 runs some of the best conferences for anyone passionate about the future of healthcare and medicine. I just attended its Technology for Precision Health Summit which focuses on predictive health and predictive medicine.
Linda Molnar, Chair of the Technology for Precision Health Summit, set to the tone for the day, speaking of what we can do today to improve care for the future.
In 2005, the market cap of Illumina, now the major gene sequencing company, was only $250 million. There was a relatively negligible amount of venture capital investment in digital healthcare. Now, in 2017, the market cap of Illumina, I checked this morning, is approaching $32 billion. And 2017 was a record-breaking year for venture capital invested in digital healthcare. When you start past $4 billion…
I sat next to Carmen Perez, a Healthcare professional passionate about innovation. Other attendees included physicians, researchers, oncologists and venture capitalists.
Claudia Williams, CEO of Manifest MedEx gave the Keynote. Claudia served as Senior Advisor for Health Innovation and Technology in the Obama White House. Claudia’s goal is to create an open platform of data, a health information exchange for the 21st century that brings together plans, providers, hospitals to share data and make it accessible through open API platform.
When I was at the White House, I helped launch and lead the precision medicine initiative, which was an ambitious project to found the framing hand of the 21st century, bringing together data, genomics data, health record data, wearable data from a million or more Americans, making that accessible on an open platform and with the goal of revolutionizing the discovery of new therapies and treatment.
Following Claudia’s Keynote, the first panel focused on Precision Medicine Pt. I – How Science and Technology are Changing Patient Care in Oncology. We heard from Jonathan Hirsch, founder and president at Syapse, which is in the business of implementing precision medicine in oncology.
Also on the panel was Anna Barry, a molecular pathologist and the Scientific Director at the Personalized Medicine Program at Swedish, a large private hospital that’s very research focused. They have over 700 clinical trials.
We heard from Vineeta Agarwala, a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health. Vineeta shared that she had the epiphany that if we don’t figure out how to annotate genomic data well, and annotate it well at scale, sequencing data will never make it into the clinic in a meaningful way.
At it’s core, one of Flatiron’s mission, we are an oncology focused health-tech company based in New York. We make both provider facing software, such as an EMR product that’s used by a significant fraction of the community of oncology practices all across the country as well as research product and data sets, that are gleaned, again, largely the wealth, the majority of cancer patients today, in American who happen to be seen at excellent community centers all across the country.
Trained as a Neuro-Oncologist, Andrew Norton, Chief Medical Officer at Koda Health was also on the panel. Koda is a healthcare data analytics company, which focusing on cancer.
Essentially our core innovation that led to the founding of the company was the idea that without deep clinical data, and without the ability to stratify patients into meaningful, clinically determined sub-groups, you really can’t compare patient treatment pathways and outcomes across centers and across geography.
So essentially what we do, is we go into electronic medical records. We pull out all of the clinically relevant data that oncologists have told us matter in making treatment decisions, we condense that information into a digital code and then we use it to track patient treatment paths and outcomes over time. And really the fundamental goal of all that work is to enable providers to perform under value-based care contracts.
During the panel, Hirsch brought up that we have to think about it as how we combine molecular and clinical data and use that insight to enable a provider to make a better care decision for the patient.
He also made a very clear distinction between personalized medicine and precision medicine.
“And just to amplify that, we sometimes thing that there’s been a shift and personalized medicine and precision medicine are actually the same thing, and we’re just using different language. I don’t think that that’s the case. I really do think that there are these two complementary concepts of precision medicine being a data-driven approach and personalized, hopefully incorporating precision, but really thinking about the holistic care of the patient, supportive care services, psychological counseling, nutrition, etc. So I do think there are these two separate concepts, we shouldn’t confuse them. And both of them are incredibly important.”
Agarwala highlighted key questions we should consider including,
-
Where is the data to help physicians help make a decision about whether or not a particular therapy will work?
-
Where is the data to generate our collective understanding of what mutations confer resistance to therapy?
And I think today, while in some parts of the country there are molecular tumor boards and studies and post-effective studies that are extraordinary in their depth and characterization of patient outcomes they are not pervasive.
Unfortunately, for every patient who was in a study like that there are typically about a hundred who are undergoing the same type of care somewhere that’s completely silent to the research community. In a way that’s passive exhaust in our healthcare system that no one can access to learn from.”
There’s much more that I’ll share with you next week.
Image credit: Health 2.0
