This week we look at pills that text your doctor, the cost of innovation in pharma, social media challenges in the pharma space, self-expiring medicine packaging and managing big data with machine learning:
– According to the World Health Organization around 50% of patients fail to take medicines correctly and at the same time over 50% of drugs are prescribed, dispensed or sold inappropriately. BBC News’ The Pill That Texts The Doctor – From Inside Your Body introduces Proteus’ tiny ingestible sensor which works like a ‘potato battery’ that can be embedded in a tablet
– The estimated the cost of inventing and developing a drug is estimated at $1 billion or more. 19 in 20 medicines in experimental development will fail. How Much Does Pharmaceutical Innovation Cost? A Look At 100 Companies from Forbes ranks R&D spending per new drug in 100 pharma companies, offering insights into research spending with the acknowledgement that the method used admittedly has flaws
– Understanding the challenges of social media enables marketers to overcome them and provide information to people via the channels they prefer. Overcoming Social Media’s Challenges from MediaPost Marketing:Health covers three unique challenges of social media for the makers of prescription products
– Instead of simply printing the expiration date on a blister pack of medicine, which can be hard to read or which can wear off, why not coat the foil with a specially treated paper that changes color as it ages? Whether or not the concept can clear regulatory and legal hurdles is unknown. In How Self-Expiring Medicine Packaging Could Change The World Fast Company discusses the innovative packaging and questions if big pharma would embrace the idea
– Harvard Business Review’s explains A Better Way to Tackle All That Data is a problem crying out for a solution that has long been in development but only recently has begun to be effective and economically feasible enough for widespread adoption – machine learning. The application of machine learning in health care is essential to achieving the goal of personalized medicine (the concept that every patient is subtly different and should be treated uniquely)
That wraps this week’s review of news from and for the pharma insight community. I’ll leave you with an invitation to learn more about the benefits of real time data and offer you a personal demo of InCrowd’s on-demand platform providing you direct and immediate access to Crowds of screened and targeted healthcare professionals.
If you have tips, suggestions or resources you’d like to share leave us a note below and please feel free to suggest topics that you’d like to see covered in future posts.
