"I see that my daughters understand the field more than I do," said Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) president and CEO Dr. Jeremy Levin at the IATI-Biomed 2013 conference today, in a remark about digital medicine, which is taking over the healthcare industry. "I simply decided to go to Silicon Valley. I spent four days with young people in short pants and sandals, who are already wealthier than I will ever be, and I realized an important thing: the day before a medication is launched, the pharmaceutical companies know more about it than the patients, but the day after the launch, the patients already know more."
Levin means that patients taking medication know personally, rather than second-hand or from statistical analysis, the effects of the drug on them. Every patient knows only about his medication, but the aggregation of this knowledge, which the Internet now makes possible, allows the collation of data about medications far beyond with the pharmaceutical companies could obtain until now, for better or worse.
Teva intends to exploit crowdsourcing to improve the precision of dosages for specific patients and the chances that a patient who has been prescribed a drug takes it regularly. The company also wants to exploit crowdsourcing to obtain ideas for repositioning products. "If you have an idea for a product that is already used in one field and you think can be used in another, don’t hesitate to suggest the idea to us at our booth," he told the audience.
Teva does not only use crowd-sourcing to obtain ideas for repositioning products, but also uses the experts. "We hope to find scientific basis for the similarity between different diseases so that we can know in advance which other diseases existing drugs can treat. We already know about the similarity between different diseases of the central nervous system," said Levin.
Teva hopes to use this approach to bring to market ten new products, which are upgrades of current products or new indications for them, every year over the next decade. "Other companies can bring improved products to market, but can they bring ten products a year?" said Levin. "Only Teva can do this because it combines new drug development capabilities with generics.
"Other companies don’t touch generics, even though they have generics departments, because they are 'bad'. They have generics activities, but they don’t talk about them and definitely don’t talk with them, or at least they haven’t talked with them lately. Only at Teva do both these fields cooperate."
Levin added, "25% of global investment in R&D is in cancer, but there are only 5-10 advanced clinical trials for heart failure, even though they kill equally, compared with thousands of trials for cancer. That is because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves them more quickly. If you have cancer, you can expect that some of your problems will be solved in the near future, but not heart failure."
"Our job is to enable patients to live longer, better lives, because access to healthcare is a foundation of democratic society," Levin concluded.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 11, 2013
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