Podcast transcript: When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?

Juliette Foster

Hello and welcome to The Better Question, EY’s series of podcasts that answer the questions that will help you lead your business through this transformative age. I am your host, Juliette Foster, and today, we are going to get under the skin of the life sciences industry.

We’re answering the better question:

When a human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture the value? We have two guests to help us answer this question.

Professor Jackie Hunter is a director of BenevolentAI, which pioneers the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to research new medicines and develop blueprints to cure sicknesses. Jackie leads the application of BenevolentAI’s technology for clinical development.

Pamela Spence leads EY's Global Health Sciences and Wellness practice, a team of more than 10,000 industry professionals globally, advising life sciences companies in all areas of their business and financial strategies.

I caught up with both of them at BenevolentAI’s offices in London.

Juliette Foster

Before we get started, I’d like to understand what makes you both feel so passionately about this topic? Starting with you, Jackie.

Jackie Hunter

I have spent the bulk of my career in the pharmaceutical industry. And when I left the company I worked for, I realized that actually we had to do things differently. The pharmaceutical industry is actually failing to innovate consistently. And the exciting thing for me about joining BenevolentAI was that we had a real opportunity to do things differently, be totally disruptive and just re-engineer the whole model. So that's why I am at BenevolentAI, and why I care passionately about the effects of big data and AI on health care.

Juliette Foster

And what makes you feel so passionate about this, Pamela?

Pamela Spence

I started life in the laboratory, trying to stimulate medicines, but moved into the consulting area. I'm passionate about helping the industry globally, make health care more accessible and more affordable to all, and at the same time, make sure that it's working in very personalized ways.

Juliette Foster

Turning to our better question for today: “When a human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?”. Pamela, take that question apart for me.

Pamela Spence

As we discover more and more about the human body, there are so many data processes that lie within it that we have yet to understand fully. So if you link that with the pace of change and the technology developments, the data collection through sensors that we're beginning to see emerge, I do believe that the human body is going to be one of the biggest sources of data in the future. And so, understanding the data within the platform of the human body will really bring great dividends to the wider health care industry in the future.

Juliette Foster

So as we capture more data from the human body that data will benefit traditional life sciences companies, but also new players to the industry and presumably us as individuals. Jackie, what do you feel the life sciences industry’s ambition should be?

Jackie Hunter

You've got over 35 trillion cells in your body; we produce chemical reactions, billions every second, every minute. So what we want to do in the life sciences is to be able to use technology to bring together all these different sources of data, and look for new patterns and new insights. It's only then that we'll really be able to understand disease; bear in mind that we've got 9,000 diseases for which there are no treatments and 7,000 of those are rare diseases. So AI, data and all these new technologies are really going to help the scientists understand diseases and the human body better. 

Juliette Foster

So this is exciting because technology and data have the potential to really accelerate the identification and cure of diseases. What are life sciences companies doing — or should they be doing — to seize this opportunity?

Pamela Spence

To create value or future value in the industry, organizations really need to focus on unlocking the power of data to fuel innovation. So looking at how you can connect data, combine data and share data better to fuel innovation, to deliver a better health outcome, but in a very personalized way. 

As well as technology and data, we as consumers, through the access to data and information, are becoming more and more demanding. And I think the opportunity in health care and life sciences is that as populations increase because we're all living longer, but we're not necessarily living healthier. So advances in technology, and also understanding consumer behavior and high levels of personalized medicine, I think, are hugely exciting and hugely important. 

Juliette Foster

What advances are you already seeing in this area?

Jackie Hunter

We're seeing real advances in diagnosis through the automation and interrogation of pathology and radiology data. But, of course, if you haven't got a treatment, then diagnosing a disease actually doesn't add a lot of value to the patient.

Going forward, I think we will also see changes in the way that patients use their own data and control their own data, and use it to inform how they manage their own health care. And at the very least, if we could improve patient compliance — over 50% of patients don't take their drugs when they should — that in itself will make a huge difference to the health care burden.

Juliette Foster

Can you give an example of how health data is being captured?

Pamela Spence

Wearables are becoming much more prevalent. So the vital signs that one measures or the physician measures, either in the primary care or the secondary care environment, now can be done by yourself on your body. Small things like this though will pay massive dividends. And I do believe, you know, we'll be able to have blood tests at home. So then we've got full vital sign capture, we've got full blood capture and we don't need to go to the actual facility for our health care per se. And I think that makes us more empowered because we get access to more and we become more responsible, linked with all the behavioral nudges. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for us to have better access to health care because the health care industry starts to revolve around us as patients, rather than we having to, at some personal cost to ourselves, try to fit into a clunky and very antiquated system.

Juliette Foster

Jackie, how are you using data and AI to help develop cures for diseases at BenevolentAI?

Jackie Hunter

I come from the pharmaceutical industry, which is slightly different to other industries in that 95% of what the industry does never makes it to market. It's an unsustainable level of failure and it's understandable, given 10,000 new biomedical papers are uploaded onto the internet every day, that the industry has not been able hitherto to use all that information to pick the right proteins in the body to really understand disease, and come up with more effective and efficient medicines. 

What we do at BenevolentAI is we have a platform that allows us to access this huge amount of data, and be able to generate new, better ideas about novel treatments for diseases. And then use that technology to come up with new molecules much more rapidly, and also with more predictive properties. So we can accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development probably threefold, and at the same time, reduce the costs as well.

Juliette Foster

Is life sciences ahead of other industries in terms of its adoption of AI?

Jackie Hunter

Life sciences in general lag behind the adoption of AI. The reason for that is surprising because when you consider that it costs over US$2 billion to bring a drug to market, you would think that companies would be looking to adopt whatever technology they could to really improve their success rates.

However, AI and better use of data demand being able to do things differently. We can generate hundreds of hypotheses in a week, whereas before in my previous life in a company, you would be testing one or two in a disease over a couple of years. It's breaking down the traditional silos between departments across therapeutic areas.

And so I think that there's going to have to be a lot of commitment from the top to really drive this disruption. And then other technology, for example, blockchain technology, which allows consumers and patients to own their own data, and to really track what happens to it, I think, is going to really disrupt the contract research organization (CRO) industry.

Juliette Foster

Much of what you’re both describing relies on the notion that people’s personal data will be able to be shared. What about data privacy?

Jackie Hunter

There are a number of important principles here. Data privacy is extremely important, but there are many business models, which allow the sharing of data while maintaining data privacy. Recently, Sensyne Health floated and that has a very innovative business model, combining access to data from health trusts in an anonymized way, but also the health trust, if there is any upside, will get a share of that upside, which will, of course, benefit them and their patients. So transparency of what the data is going to be used for is really, really important. And, if one ascribes to those principles, then I think there are a lot of opportunities to be able to access and share data in a way that doesn't affect privacy. And of course, you know, there are many safeguards from a regulatory point of view as well as to that.

Pamela Spence

Sick people don't care who uses their data because they want to get better. So I think there's a whole question around data ownership and there's a lot of work being done about who actually owns my health data. I'm a British citizen, so do I own it? Do the hospital trusts own it? Do the Secretary of State or the National Health Service (NHS) ultimately own it? And so I think there's some, there's a calling for complete transparency. And of course, we do have technologies that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. So, I think it can be overcome.

Juliette Foster

How will the transformation of the life sciences industry impact its traditional powerhouses?

Pamela Spence

Traditionally, in health care, we've had power really existing between the major life sciences companies and the providers. There's an opportunity for that power to shift to health payers, to consumers because we're becoming more and more demanding about our own health. And also creates opportunities for new technology companies because existing skills in companies that have been very successful to now aren't necessarily those skills that are going to make them successful in the future.

Juliette Foster

As data becomes more valuable in the administration of health care, I imagine we will see more and more collaborations between traditional life sciences companies and digital businesses. Do you think that will present challenges from a cultural standpoint?

Pamela Spence

Speaking to a major pharma, about a year ago, this particular, very well-known life sciences company was, was collaborating with a technology company. And the corporate development officer explained to me it was the hardest deal that he had ever done. And so we unpicked that, it wasn't the, the science was difficult, it wasn't anything to do with that, it was all to do with culture. And he would describe his traditional, bio-pharmaceutical company as quite slow to make decisions and quite fearful, and I'm being provocative here, but fearful of regulation, because that's the industry.

And then in contrast, the organization that they were trying to collaborate with makes decisions very fast, and I wouldn't say fearless of regulation, but doesn't have that same fear in their mindset and their culture about regulation. And it was that cultural aspect that made the collaboration really very hard to execute. It’s not only the, the science that's going to make things difficult and why technologies are, are slower to be adopted. I think culture in the industry plays a really big part of why things aren't as adopted as fast as certainly I would welcome to the betterment of solving all those unmet medical needs.

Juliette Foster

If those sorts of challenges can be overcome, do you see the health care industry in one sense converging with the other industries, such as tech?

Jackie Hunter

There are health care arms across a whole range of different sectors, you've got companies, such as Microsoft have wet labs, you have Google and Apple have drug discovery organizations, and Amazon is getting into health care delivery. There's no doubt that we're going to see a fundamental shift of the key players in this sector. And as we mentioned earlier, the culture is very different. So that is going to drive a different pace, it's going to drive a difference in the acceptance and challenge of how things are done in an established way, and probably a new dialogue with regulators as well.

Juliette Foster

What new types of business models do you see in our future?

Pamela Spence

So the great platform business models that we see today are, of course, Uber and Airbnb. But all they really are at the end of the day is an interface that brings value to another party in a convenient and easy-to-use way. I think technology brings us the opportunity to create those interfaces. And, the more well-established companies in health care today really do need to critically examine themselves in terms of where they are going to put that platform-based business model that exchanges internally within their business to make them more efficient, and also externally to really drive a highly personalized interaction, and service to their customers and stakeholders.

Jackie Hunter

If you look at your examples, who, who would have thought that the biggest taxi firm in the world wouldn't own a single car or the biggest accommodation provider wouldn't own a single room. We should open our minds to completely new ways of doing things.

Juliette Foster

What do you think life sciences companies can actually learn from other sectors about using data to create new business opportunities?

Pamela Spence

Well, I think the consumer industry is really interesting because the profitability margins have been much smaller than say in comparison to, to big pharma and health care in the past. They have had to really personalize their offer, and engage and understand what their customers actually want. The buyer of services in health care used to be the health care physician, the health care provider (HCP). I do believe that we are going to switch to actually the true customer in health care is going to be the patient consumer, and I use those words interchangeably themselves. And I think that represents a really interesting conundrum for the established infrastructure that we know today. Now clearly, we still need science and, and professionals who are dedicated there, that work to the betterment of science. But I do think there is a new customer emerging, and actually understanding that customer and what they want with all the data sensors, with everything that we have talked about, I think that's really important. Now, consumer products and retail have really started to understand their customer better than they know themselves. So I think that's an opportunity and a big learning that the health care industry can take. Your doctor knows best in many circumstances, but doesn't always know the best, I think, is really what I'm saying.

Juliette Foster

Let’s assume the technology, the data, the infrastructure and the funding are all in place to implement this new health care system. Will people accept it?

Jackie Hunter

The behavioral factors are going to be really important. Just to give you an example, I was talking at a conference last year, and I was saying how in pathology the machines are already able to pick up normal and allow the pathologist to focus on the difficult cases. Unfortunately, a professor in the audience stood up, and told me I was talking absolute rot and there was no way a machine would ever be able to do that. So I think there may still be some challenges to the uptake of the technology in certain quarters.

Pamela Spence

I think it all centers around trust. We have to flex our attitude to trust, we need to trust these technologies. The younger generation trusts the algorithm to find them a date. So there's a whole level of sort of trust that is coming into the equation. I mean doctors don't even trust you to take your own blood pressure reading at home, right? I mean, at, at the base, many don't. So how do you trust each other, how do you trust technology?

Jackie Hunter

And, one of the reasons a lot of these technologies are being taken up in the developing world more quickly is because there is nothing there for them to replace. So it's the only way that people can access better health care. So the trust is almost there implicitly.

And that’s it for today’s episode. As ever, the answer to a better question often leads to more. Let me leave you with a few to ponder.

• How will you harness the power of data to fuel innovation?

• Do you want to be a first mover — or would you rather be a first responder?

• In this data-driven world, is trust the hardest thing to build?

________

 

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Until next time, goodbye.

Disclaimer: The views of third parties set out in this publication are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.