At the confluence of Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law the next frontier in drug delivery becomes data-driven, personalised and outcome-based- Dr Ramin Rafiei, director of digital healthcare at SHL Group writes.
SHL Group
Over the past few decades, the cost of bringing new drugs to market has been doubling every nine years. This exponential trend, measured as the number of FDA approvals per billion USD spent on R&D, is known as the Moore’s law of the pharmaceutical industry and labelled Eroom’s law1 – Moore spelt backwards. Compounding this diminishing return on pharmaceutical R&D investments is the gap between clinical efficacy of medications as determined in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) setting and their real-world effectiveness.
Medication adherence is the key factor for the gap between RCT efficacy and real-world effectiveness as typically 50% of patients with chronic conditions fail to take the recommended therapeutic dose consistently, resulting in poor health outcomes and increased healthcare costs2. As a result, solely relying on the clinical efficacy of new medications is not the solution to chronic disease management; rather, we need to find ways to help patients self-manage existing conditions. This also presents pharmaceutical companies with a $600 billion-plus opportunity, which is otherwise lost revenue due to medication non-adherence3.