Your Prescription Is Ready for Download
A close up of a doctor pointing at a smart phone, heralding the new era of prescription digital therapeutics.
You may be familiar with Moore's Law, the prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that computer chips would get faster and cheaper with each passing year. That's been borne out by the explosive growth of the tech industry, but you may not know that there is an inverse Moore's Law for drug development.
What if there were a way to apply the fast-moving, low-cost techniques of software development to drug discovery?
Eroom's Law—yes that's "Moore" spelled backward—is the observation that drug discovery has become slower and more expensive over time, despite technological improvements. And just like Moore's Law, it's been borne out by experience—from the 1950s to today, the number of drugs that can be developed per billion dollars in spending has steadily decreased, contributing to the continued growth of health care costs.
But what if there were a way to apply the fast-moving, low-cost techniques of software development to drug discovery? That's what a group of startups in the new field of digital therapeutics are promising. They develop apps that are used—either on their own or in conjunction with conventional drugs—to treat chronic disorders like addiction, diabetes and mental health that have so far resisted a pharmaceutical approach. Unlike the thousands of wellness and health apps that can be downloaded to your phone, digital therapeutics are developed and are meant to be used like drugs, complete with clinical trials, FDA approval and doctor prescriptions.
The field is hot—in 2017 global investment in digital therapeutics jumped to $11.5 billion, a fivefold increase from 2012, and major pharma companies like Novartis are developing their own digital products or partnering with startups. One such startup is the bicoastal Pear Therapeutics. Last month, Pear's reSET-O product became the first digital therapeutic to be approved for use by the millions of Americans who struggle with opioid use disorder, and the company has other products addressing addiction and mental illness in the pipeline.
I spoke with Dr. Corey McCann, Pear's CEO, about the company's efforts to meld software and medicine, designing clinical trials for an entirely new kind of treatment, and the future of digital therapeutics.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
"We're looking at conditions that currently can't be cured with drugs."
BRYAN WALSH: What makes a digital therapeutic different than a wellness app?
COREY MCCANN: What we do is develop therapeutics that are designed to be used under the auspices of a physician, just as a drug developed under good manufacturing would be. We do clinical studies for both safety and efficacy, and then they go through the development process you'd expect for a drug. We look at the commercial side, at the role of doctors. Everything we do is what would be done with a traditional medical product. It's a piece of software developed like a drug.
WALSH: What kind of conditions are you first aiming to treat with digital therapeutics?
MCCANN: We're looking at conditions that currently can't be cured with drugs. A good example is our reSET product, which is designed to treat addiction to alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, cocaine. There really aren't pharmaceutical products that are approved to treat people addicted to these substances. What we're doing is functional therapy, the standard of care for addiction treatment, but delivered via software. But we can also work with medication—our reSET-O product is a great example. It's for patients struggling with opioid addiction, and it's delivered in concert with the drug buprenorphine.
WALSH: Walk me through what the patient experience would be like for someone on a digital therapeutic like reSET.
MCCANN: Imagine you're a patient who has been diagnosed with cocaine addiction by a doctor. You would then receive a prescription for reSET during the same office visit. Instead of a pharmacy, the script is sent to the reSET Connect Patient Service Center, where you are onboarded and given an access code that is used to unlock the product after downloading it onto your device. The product has 60 different modules—each one requiring about a 10 to 15-minute interaction—all derived from a form of cognitive behavioral therapy called community reinforcement approach. The treatment takes place over 90 days.
"The patients receiving the digital therapeutic were more than twice as likely to remain abstinent as those receiving standard care."
Patients report their substance abuse, cravings and triggers, and they are also tested on core proficiencies through the therapy. Physicians have access to all of their data, which helps facilitate their one-on-one meetings. We know from regular urine tests how effective the treatment is.
WALSH: What kind of data did you find when you did clinical studies on reSET?
MCCANN: We had 399 patients in 10 centers taking part in a randomized clinical trial run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Every patient enrolled in the study had an active substance abuse disorder. The study was randomized so that patients either received the best current standard of care, which is three hours a week of face-to-face therapy, or they received the digital therapeutic. The primary endpoint was abstinence in weeks 9 to 12—if the patient had a single dirty urine screen in the last month, they counted as a failure.
In the end, the patients receiving the digital therapeutic were more than twice as likely to remain abstinent as those receiving standard care—40 percent versus 17 percent. Those receiving reSET were also much more likely to remain in treatment through the entire trial.
WALSH: Why start by focusing your first digital therapeutics on addiction?
MCCANN: We have tried to build a company that is poised to make a difference in medicine. If you look at addiction, there is little to nothing in the drug pipeline to address this. More than 30 million people in the U.S. suffer from addiction disorders, and not only is efficacy a concern, but so is access. Many patients aren't able to receive anything like the kind of face-to-face therapy our control group received. So we think digital therapeutics can make a difference there as well.
WALSH: reSET was the first digital therapeutic approved by the FDA to treat a specific disorder. What has the approval process been like?
MCCANN: It's been a learning process for all involved, including the FDA. Our philosophy is to work within the clinical trials structure, which has specific disease targets and endpoints, and develop quality software, and bring those two strands together to generate digital therapeutics. We now have two products that have been FDA-approved, and four more in development. The FDA is appropriately cautious about all of this, balancing the tradeoff between patient risk and medical value. As we see it, our company is half tech and half biotech, and we follow regulatory trials that are as rigorous as they would be with any drug company.
"This is a new space, but when you look back in 10 years there will be an entire industry of prescription digital therapeutics."
WALSH: How do you balance those two halves, the tech side and the biology side? Tech companies are known for iterating rapidly and cheaply, while pharma companies develop drugs slowly and expensively.
MCCANN: This is a new space, but when you look back in 10 years there will be an entire industry of prescription digital therapeutics. Right now for us we're combining the rigor of the pharmaceutical model with the speed and agility of a tech company. Our product takes longer to develop than an unverified health app, but less time and with less clinical risk than a new molecular entity. This is still a work in progress and not a day goes by where we don't notice the difference between those disciplines.
WALSH: Who's going to pay for these treatments? Insurers are traditionally slow to accept new innovations in the therapeutic space.
MCCANN: This is just like any drug launch. We need to show medical quality and value, and we need to get clinician demand. We want to focus on demonstrating as many scripts as we can in 2019. And we know we'll need to be persistent—we live in a world where payers will say no to anything three times before they say yes. Demonstrating value is how you get there.
WALSH: Is part of that value the possibility that digital therapeutics could be much cheaper than paying someone for multiple face-to-face therapy sessions?
MCCANN: I believe the cost model is very compelling here, especially when you can treat diseases that were not treatable before. That is something that creates medical value. Then you have the data aspect, which makes our product fundamentally different from a drug. We know everything about every patient that uses our product. We know engagement, we can push patient self-reports to clinicians. We can measure efficiency out in the real world, not just in a measured clinical trial. That is the holy grail in the pharma world—to understand compliance in practice.
WALSH: What's the future of digital therapeutics?
MCCANN: In 10 years, what we think of as digital medicine will just be medicine. This is something that will absolutely become standard of care. We are working on education to help partners and payers figure out where go from here, and to incorporate digital therapeutics into standard care. It will start in 2019 and 2020 with addiction medicine, and then in three to five years you'll see treatments designed to address disorders of the brain. And then past the decade horizon you'll see plenty of products that aim at every facet of medicine.
A Doctor Who Treated His Own Rare Disease Is Tracking COVID-19 Treatments Hiding In Plain Sight
Dr. David Fajgenbaum looking through a microscope at his lab.
In late March, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up in the United States, David Fajgenbaum, a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, devised a 10-day challenge for his lab: they would sift through 1,000 recently published scientific papers documenting cases of the deadly virus from around the world, pluck out the names of any drugs used in an attempt to cure patients, and track the treatments and their outcomes in a database.
Before late 2019, no one had ever had to treat this exact disease before, which meant all treatments would be trial and error. Fajgenbaum, a pioneering researcher in the field of drug repurposing—which prioritizes finding novel uses for existing drugs, rather than arduously and expensively developing new ones for each new disease—knew that physicians around the world would be embarking on an experimental journey, the scale of which would be unprecedented. His intention was to briefly document the early days of this potentially illuminating free-for-all, as a sidebar to his primary field of research on a group of lymph node disorders called Castleman disease. But now, 11 months and 29,000 scientific papers later, he and his team of 22 are still going strong.
On a Personal Mission
<p>In the science and medical world, Fajgenbaum lives a dual existence: he is both researcher and subject, physician and patient. In July 2010, when he was a healthy and physically fit 25-year-old finishing medical school, he began living through what would become a recurring, unprovoked, and overzealous immune response that repeatedly almost killed him.</p><p>His lymph nodes were inflamed; his liver, kidneys, and bone marrow were faltering; and he was dead tired all the time. At first his doctors mistook his mysterious illness for lymphoma, but his inflamed lymph nodes were merely a red herring. A month after his initial hospitalization, pathologists at Mayo Clinic finally diagnosed him with idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease—a particularly ruthless form of a class of lymph node disorders that doesn't just attack one part of the body, but many, and has no known cause. It's a rare diagnosis within an already rare set of disorders. Only about 1,500 Americans a year receive the same diagnosis. </p><p>Without many options for treatment, Fajgenbaum underwent recurring rounds of chemotherapy. Each time, the treatment would offer temporary respite from Castleman symptoms, but bring the full spate of chemotherapy side effects. And it wasn't a sustainable treatment for the long haul. Regularly dousing a person's cells in unmitigated toxicity was about as elegant a solution to Fajgenbaum's disease as bulldozing a house in response to a toaster fire. The fire might go out (though not necessarily), but the house would be destroyed.</p><p>A swirl of exasperation and doggedness finally propelled Fajgenbaum to take on a crucial question himself: Among all of the already FDA-approved drugs on the market, was there something out there, labeled for another use, that could beat back Castleman disease and that he could tolerate long-term? After months of research, he discovered the answer: sirolimus, a drug normally prescribed to patients receiving a kidney transplant, could be used to suppress his overactive immune system with few known side effects to boot.</p><p>Fajgenbaum became hellbent on devoting his practice and research to making similar breakthroughs for others. He founded the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, to coordinate the research of others studying this bewildering disease, and directs a laboratory consumed with studying cytokine storms—out-of-control immune responses characterized by the body's release of cytokines, proteins that the immune system secretes and uses to communicate with and direct other cells. </p><p>In the spring of 2020, when cytokine storms emerged as a hallmark of the most severe and deadly cases of COVID-19, Fajgenbaum's ears perked up. Although SARS-CoV-2 itself was novel, Fajgenbaum already had almost a decade of experience battling the most severe biological forces it brought. Only this time, he thought, it might actually be easier to pinpoint a treatment—unlike Castleman disease, which has no known cause, at least here a virus was clearly the instigator. </p>Thinking Beyond COVID
<p>The week of March 13, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Fajgenbaum found himself hoping that someone would make the same connection and apply the research to COVID. "Then like a minute later I was like, 'Why am I hoping that someone, somewhere, either follows our footsteps, or has a similar background to us? Maybe we just need to do it," he says. And the CORONA Project was born—first as a 10-day exercise, and later as the robust, interactive tool it now is. </p><p>All of the 400 treatments in the CORONA database are examples of repurposed drugs, or off-label uses: physicians are prescribing drugs to treat COVID that have been approved for a different disease. There are no bonafide COVID treatments, only inferences. The goal for people like Fajgenbaum and Stone is to identify potential treatments for further study and eventual official approval, so that physicians can treat the disease with a playbook in hand. When it works, drug repurposing opens up a way to move quickly: A range of treatments could be available to patients within just a few years of a totally new virus entering our reality compared with the 12 - 19 years new drug development takes.</p><p>"Companies for many decades have explored the use of their products for not just a single indication but often for many indications," says Stone. "'Supplemental approvals' are all essentially examples of drug repurposing, we just didn't call it that. The challenge, I think, is to explore those opportunities more comprehensively and systematically to really try to understand the full breadth of potential activity of any drug or molecule."</p>The left column shows the path of a repurposed drug, and on the right is the path of a newly discovered and developed drug.
Cures Within Reach
A Confounding Virus
<p>The FDA declined to comment on what drugs it was fast-tracking for trials, but Fajgenbaum says that based on the CORONA Project's data, which includes data from smaller trials that have already taken place, he feels there are three drugs that seem the most clearly and broadly promising for large-scale studies. Among them are <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30503-8/fulltext" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>dexamethasone</u></a>, which is a steroid with anti-inflammatory effects, and <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-authorizes-drug-combination-treatment-covid-19" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>baricitinib</u></a>, a rheumatoid arthritis drug, both of which have enabled the sickest COVID-19 patients to bounce back by suppressing their immune systems. The third most clearly promising drug is <a href="https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/full-dose-blood-thinners-decreased-need-life-support-improved-outcome-hospitalized-covid-19-patients" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>heparin</u></a>, a blood thinner, which a recent trial showed to be most helpful when administered at a full dose, more so than at a small, preventative dose. (On the flipside, Fajgenbaum says "it's a little sad" that in the database you can see hydroxychloroquine is still the most-prescribed drug being tried as a COVID treatment around the world, despite over the summer being <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021801" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>debunked</u></a> widely as an effective treatment, and continuously since then.)</p><p>One of the confounding attributes of SARS-CoV-2 is its ability to cause such a huge spectrum of outcomes. It's unlikely a silver bullet treatment will emerge under that reality, so the database also helps surface drugs that seem most promising for a specific population. <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2773108" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>Fluvoxamine</u></a>, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, showed promise in the recovery of outpatients—those who were sick, but not severely enough to be hospitalized. <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2772185" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>Tocilizumab</u></a>, which was actually developed for Castleman disease, the disease Fajgenbaum is managing, was initially written off as a COVID treatment because it failed to benefit large portions of hospitalized patients, but now seems to be effective if used on intensive care unit patients within 24 hours of admission—these are some of the sickest patients with the highest risk of dying. </p><p>Other than fluvoxamine, most of the drugs labeled as promising do skew toward targeting hospitalized patients, more than outpatients. One reason, Fajgenbaum says, is that "if you're in a hospital it's very easy to give you a drug and to track you, and there are very objective measurements as to whether you die, you progress to a ventilator, etc." Tracking outpatients is far more difficult, especially when folks have been routinely asked to stay home, quarantine, and free up hospital resources if they're experiencing only mild symptoms. </p><p>But the other reason for the skew is because COVID is very unlike most other diseases in terms of the human immune response the virus triggers. For example, if oncology treatments show some benefit to people with the highest risk of dying, then they usually work extremely well if administered in the earlier stages of a cancer diagnosis. Across many diseases, this dialing backward is a standard approach to identifying promising treatments. With COVID, all of that reasoning has proven moot. </p><p>As we've seen over the last year, COVID cases often start as asymptomatic, and remain that way for days, indicating the body is mounting an incredibly weak immune response initially. Then, between days five and 14, as if trying to make up for lost time, the immune system overcompensates by launching a major inflammatory response, which in the sickest patient can lead to the type of cytokine storms that helped Fajgenbaum realize his years of Castleman research might be useful during this public health crisis. Because of this phased response, you can't apply the same treatment logic to all cases.</p><p>"In COVID, drugs that work late tend to not work if given early, and drugs that work early tend to not work if given late," says Fajgenbaum. "Generally this … is not a commonplace thing for a virus." </p>Announcing March Event: "COVID Vaccines and the Return to Life: Part 1"
Leading medical and scientific experts will discuss the latest developments around the COVID-19 vaccines at our March 11th event.
EVENT INFORMATION
DATE:
Thursday, March 11th, 2021 at 12:30pm - 1:45pm EST
On the one-year anniversary of the global declaration of the pandemic, this virtual event will convene leading scientific and medical experts to discuss the most pressing questions around the COVID-19 vaccines. Planned topics include the effect of the new circulating variants on the vaccines, what we know so far about transmission dynamics post-vaccination, how individuals can behave post-vaccination, the myths of "good" and "bad" vaccines as more alternatives come on board, and more. A public Q&A will follow the expert discussion.
SPEAKERS:
<img lazy-loadable="true" data-runner-src="https://leaps.org/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY3Mzc4NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NjYwNjU4NX0.Tdrh5pze5P4XxgiJK3J4JFrsrijfabIzNJz-AATghDE/image.jpg?width=534&coordinates=365%2C3%2C299%2C559&height=462" id="87554" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b6c7311be7aec25807f9af19b683bf1d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="534" data-height="462" />Dr. Paul Offit speaking at Communicating Vaccine Science.
commons.wikimedia.org<p><strong><a href="https://www.research.chop.edu/people/paul-a-offit" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dr. Paul Offit, M.D.</a>, is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine for infants, and he has lent his expertise to the advisory committees that review data on new vaccines for the CDC and FDA.</strong></p>Dr. Monica Gandhi
UCSF Health
<p><a href="https://profiles.ucsf.edu/monica.gandhi"></a><strong><a href="https://profiles.ucsf.edu/monica.gandhi" target="_blank">Dr. Monica Gandhi, M.D., MPH,</a> is Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief (Clinical Operations/ Education) of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/ San Francisco General Hospital.</strong></p>Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu, MBBCh, FACP, FIDSA
Yale Medicine
<p><strong><a href="https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/onyema_ogbuagu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu, MBBCh</a>, is an infectious disease physician at Yale Medicine who treats COVID-19 patients and leads Yale's clinical studies around COVID-19. He ran Yale's trial of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.</strong></p>Dr. Eric Topol
Dr. Topol's Twitter
<p><strong><a href="https://www.scripps.edu/faculty/topol/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dr. Eric Topol, M.D.</a>, is a cardiologist, scientist, professor of molecular medicine, and the director and founder of Scripps Research Translational Institute. He has led clinical trials in over 40 countries with over 200,000 patients and pioneered the development of many routinely used medications.</strong></p>