Teva UK partners Closed Loop on personalised medicine
Dr Paul Goldsmith, co-founder and president of Closed Loop Medicine
Teva’s UK subsidiary has joined forces with techbio company Closed Loop Medicine to use its software as a medical device (SaMD) technology platform in the development of new personalised medicines.
Details of the alliance are sparse at the moment, but the two companies have revealed that they are looking at ways to improve drug efficacy and outcomes in patients with specific chronic disorders by combining dose-optimised drug therapy with digital care.
The companies envisage combining Closed Loop’s SaMD – which has shown its worth in a recently reported hypertension clinical trial – as “digital companions” that would be prescribed alongside Teva’s pharmaceutical products.
In the PERSONAL-CovidBP trial of Closed Loop’s smartphone-based CL-HT01 software, the SDaMD was shown to deliver improved blood pressure control and adherence to therapy, as well as reduced side effects in patients using it to manage their antihypertensive drug treatment.
“As clinicians, we know that dosing of drugs is a huge problem,” said Dr Paul Goldsmith, co-founder and president of Closed Loop Medicine, who also serves as the company’s chief medical officer and innovation officer.
“In the most extreme cases, we are seeing patients having severe adverse events, for example, when required to change dose levels to undergo surgery,” he added. “Being able to predict personalised dose levels could be transformational.”
Applying the technology to Teva’s established and new medicines could help to improve their effectiveness in the real world, according to the partners.
Personalised medicine is a term that has become a mantra in pharma, promising better outcomes for patients, but definitions vary and it is still something of a nebulous concept.
Closed Loop was set up to address the fact that most medicines are still prescribed based on their average effects in a population and rarely dose optimised for the individual, in a “one-size-fits-all” approach, recognising that personalisation remains an aspiration, rather than a reality in many health settings.
The Cambridge-based company points out that the cost of dealing with side effects of medicines in the NHS is estimated at more than £2.2 billion ($2.8 billion), while in the US a figure of $428 billion was given to the cost of managing drug-related morbidity and mortality resulting from non-optimised medication in 2016.
Teva’s general manager for the UK & Ireland, Kim Innes, commented that the company is aware “the patient experience can sometimes be less than optimal,” just ahead of a new survey indicating that public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest level in decades.
“As the largest supplier of medicines to the NHS, the potential to combine ‘drug’ & ‘digital’ could create significant improvements to lives of patients at great scale,” she added.
For more on Closed Loop Medicine's approach to personalised health, watch the video below:
