On 15 November, an exciting event made a welcome return to the Wellcome Genome Campus. Last hosted here in 2015, this year BioBeat18 explored opportunities for healthcare to take a leap forward from the point where data and biology converge. Featuring leaders from industry, investment and academia, the event delved into disrupting the healthcare industry to build sustainable business models based on biodata.
Natalie Banner is the ‘Understanding Patient Data’ lead at the Wellcome Trust, where she ensures that trustworthy systems use patient data ethically and responsibly. She also develops communications for patients that demystify how their data will be used.
“Medical data can be hugely beneficial,” she pointed out. “Patients are aware of this but are concerned about the security of their data and how private companies will use it. Even when data is anonymised, they are still keen to know that it will be used for socially responsible purposes.” The level of concern a potential breach of trust can cause was demonstrated by the recent move of DeepMind health, which uses NHS data to monitor patients for kidney injury, into the main arm of Google. Some see this move as breaking promises about keeping patient data completely separate from commercial products and services and serves as a timely warning for other businesses.
Elisa Petris, a partner at investment company Sycona, outlined the company’s interest in financing science and creating companies relating to health. She sees opportunities to disrupt healthcare through the revolutions biodata can bring about in diagnostics. “Diagnostics have a shorter approval process than drug development,” she explained. “But it can take longer to make money.” For her, the key requirements are that any new diagnostic technique must be fundamentally useful and fit easily into existing pathways. For a new diagnostic to be successful, the results generated should be clearly actionable and should not disrupt income coming from other routes. “It’s important to understand your stakeholders, the market and their behaviours,” she said. “Biodata is hugely enabling and exciting but the pathway to generating income is very challenging and varies every time.”
Liberty Foreman, CEO of BeamLine Diagnostics, co-founded the company in 2015 with Katherine Willetts, while still in the final stages of her PhD. Their aim is to bring lab research to the hospital clinic, to provide simple point of care solutions for diseases such as cancer. They are developing a biopsy triaging system that quickly identifies healthy and benign tissue specimens, so that they can be removed from the diagnosis pathway early on. “This technique is not going to unseat pathologists… for now,” she assured us. “But more than 90% of pathology samples are in fact healthy. We can scan these in 15 seconds and take them out of the pathway. This reduces pathologists’ workload by 50% and ultimately could speed up the time to diagnosis.”
So what hints and tips do these experienced disrupters of healthcare have to offer us? Jo Pisani at PwC led a Q&A with the audience. Her first question was to ask what the panellists would tell their younger selves. The general consensus was that interdisciplinary work is a great place to start. “I have made a career out of bringing different disciplines together!” said Banner.
Petris advised us not to worry about having a full career path mapped out when you leave university. “Having a direction of travel is good enough!” she said. For Foreman, the key piece of advice is to trust your gut. “I spent a long time trying to balance loads of conflicting advice. Most of all, don’t rely on good faith. Get the contract!” she warned.
So what do the panellists feel it takes to make a success out of biodata-based businesses?
Fiona Nielsen, CEO and Founder of Repositive, which provides a global exchange for data for drug research, described the challenges of finding the right market. “We needed to find investors who knew about both the life sciences and the business-to-business market. This turned out be a very small number!” For her, this was similar to the early days of building internet businesses. “You need a tech savvy customer base to become established before you can get off the ground.” Petris agreed. “Investors can become pretty silo-ed. If your business straddles more than one, you can struggle. You could see this as a failure of the market. Or perhaps you are just not meeting the utility bar to improve on what’s already available!”
For Foreman, it’s about finding the right story to tell about your product, to make it fit with the investor’s priorities and show how it will benefit them. This can help to offset any lack of investors that are already familiar with the market you are trying to break into.
And what about the team that makes it all happen? Is there something special about the staff in a small start-up business?
Foreman believes it’s better to hire people who work together well rather than focus on recruiting high achievers. “I have found that approach to be more successful than just hiring a bunch of supersmart people,” she admitted. Also, the speed the company grows is important. “In the US, there can be a rush to market, triggered by high funding levels. Sometimes the product, as well as the team dynamic, really benefits from a more organic growth process,” said Foreman.
BeamLine Diagnostics has tackled the hiring challenge by offering great work-life balance options for their teams, and responding positively to new working practices. “We have designers who are working 100% flexibly and remotely,” revealed Foreman. “The improved work-life balance attracts people, even if the salary we can offer is slightly lower and the long term career pathways might not be there yet.” This fits with the statistics that show that a higher percentage of disabled people work for SMEs rather than large businesses, perhaps due to the increased flexibility they can offer compared to large companies.
Petris in her turn put out a plea for more bioinformaticians and immunologists. “They are like gold dust!” she said. Great news for new biosciences graduates, who can sometimes get the message that jobs in this area are similarly rare and can be put off right at the start of their careers.
And how does the panel see the future?
In short – bright! Biodata is a growth area and has huge potential to change the way we access healthcare and receive diagnosis and treatment. There are important issues to address along the way, however. It is tempting to think that because younger people share more online, they will be less concerned about their data. Banner pointed out that in fact, research shows that younger people want to be asked permission more than older generations when it comes to using their data.
Trust, collaboration and communication are central for moving forwards positively, so that patients feel that they are part of the journey, not an exploited resource. BioBeat18 shows how events such as this can help to realise the full potential that biodata has to offer.
KatieGee 