With continuously rising healthcare costs, there is a fundamental need to adopt a more preemptive strategy towards healthcare. Many questions are being asked. What can one do to improve population health outcomes and reduce the burden of disease? Would preempting illness not be a better option than treating it? Can the life sciences industry leverage innovative strategies to design personalized solutions to improve health and prevent disease? Will this create a paradigm shift in healthcare strategy and R&D innovation?
Preemptive health focuses on anticipating and preventing diseases before they manifest, leveraging technological advancements to enhance early detection and intervention. Preemptive health not only calls for innovative solutions, but it calls for an innovative mindset as well.
Various innovative solutions are being developed across the industry. Etiome (a Flagship Pioneering company) recently launched its AI-powered Temporal Biodynamics platform to forecast how individuals are likely to progress along the disease continuum, confirm disease biostages with temporally relevant markers, potential disease stage–specific targets, and develop Biostaged Medicines to halt or reverse disease, and is focusing on metabolic, neurodegenerative, pre-cancerous and autoimmune diseases.
Twin Health is creating digital twins, digital replicas of a person’s metabolism to address the root causes of metabolic conditions like obesity, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes. The focus is on analyzing an individual’s gut microbiome to understand its impact on the person’s overall health. Harvard has highlighted the importance of ‘precision nutrition’, wherein an individual’s DNA, microbiome, and metabolic response to specific foods or dietary patterns are evaluated to develop tailored diets. The concept of ‘Food as a Medicine‘ is gaining importance. Companies such as Brightseed are using AI-driven platforms to identify the health benefits of plant-based bioactives which have the potential to influence the microbiome.
The Glucagon-like peptide-1 GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) market is booming as managing obesity and reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes takes center stage. The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is reportedly developing a draft research plan to determine whether to grade anti-obesity medications (AOMs) as preventive medications for chronic weight management.
Eko Health has developed AI-enabled digital stethoscopes with FDA-cleared algorithms to detect cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases during routine physical exams, facilitating early intervention and improved patient outcomes.
Genomic, Inc. has developed a test called Health Insights, which carries out polygenic risk scoring for the early detection of conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, breast cancer and prostrate cancer, now offered by the healthcare provider Bupa in the UK.
Neko Health offers AI-enabled non-invasive body scans, mapping millions of health data points on and in an individual’s body in a few minutes enabling the early detection of potential health issues.
The reality is that we need to focus on increasing our healthspan (the period of life spent in good health, free from major diseases and disabilities), not just our lifespan. We need to live healthy lives, not just longer lives. Pharmas and biotechs are increasingly focusing on developing products that increase the healthspan, in addition to lifespan. Longevity research is an area of growing importance. Bioage, for example, has entered into a multi-year research collaboration worth up to $550 million with Novartis, to identify “molecular mediators of the benefits of exercise.” Exercise can influence gene expression, but one’s capacity to exercise decreases with age. BioAge is exploring the possibility of developing a pill using its AI platform that will have the same positive effect on gene expression as exercise does, a key element of its partnership with Novartis.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) research funding agency launched in 2022, made pivotal investments in breakthrough transformative biomedical and health technologies and applicable platforms to provide health solutions for all. Early-stage funding remains challenging for healthspan innovators, and ARPA-H could serve as a valuable non-dilutive funding opportunity for them. ARPA-H’s Proactive Health initiative has a simple goal. It will promote treatments and behaviors that will reduce the likelihood that people become patients. And that is what the life sciences industry needs to prioritize. Yet care should be taken to ensure that while forecasting the likelihood of developing a disease, racial and ethnic disparities, as well as socioeconomic status (SES) should be accounted for, test results should not create unnecessary panic in a lay person, and clinical oversight should always be maintained. Pharmas and biotechs should invest in R&D to build out a pipeline of innovative products / solutions focused on preemptive health. Policy makers should encourage investment in preemptive health. At the end of the day, predictive approaches and preemptive strategies must lead the way.
