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Boston-based digital therapeutics (DTx) provider Biofourmis on Monday revealed that it both struck a deal with pharma giant Novartis to commercialize a DTx for monitoring heart failure patients and acquired wearable biosensor maker Biovotion, according to MedCity News.
Novartis and Biofourmis seek to pinpoint early signs of heart failure exacerbations and steer treatments leveraging Biovotion wearables. Previously, Biofourmis was device agnostic, incorporating a variety of wearable tech into its digital therapies — but the buy will afford Biofourmis access to a bevy of new data via Biovotion's armband, dubbed Everion, which can power its predictive analytics platform.
The wealth of data the Biofourmis product can collect could fuel more personalized treatments and clamp down on skyrocketing costs for heart failure patients. Patients taking Novartis' heart failure drug Entresto will strap on the Everion wearable and use Biofourmis' AI-powered heart failure platform to monitor their symptoms and manage their meds.
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The platform uses these insights to predict and analyze patients' drug treatments. The product will accrue a bulk of comprehensive data that could personalize therapies for a swelling population of heart failure patients: In the US alone, the number of patients afflicted by the condition is expected to balloon from about 5.5 million to 8 million over the next decade.
And the condition's price tag is expected to surge, as well: Heart failure costs the US $31 billion annually — and some projections have this number doubling by 2030. As it stares down a burgeoning mass of heart failure patients across the globe, it makes sense that Novartis would want to amass data that could guide more precise treatments and lower costs.
The team-up could shed some light on what types of DTx partnerships might be most worthwhile to pharma companies. Over the last few years, we have seen pharma companies demonstrating interest in the burgeoning DTx space through partnerships that would allow them to branch out from traditional drug development and dip into novel revenue channels. But last month, Novartis subsidiary Sandoz broke off ties with DTx vendor Pear Therapeutics about a year after the duo released an FDA-authorized digital treatment for substance abuse, handing commercialization responsibilities to Pear.
This raised questions as to how valuable alliances with smaller DTx firms are for deep-pocketed, entrenched pharma titans. We think the fact that Novartis is now aligning with a startup that's creating software that could exist alongside its medications — instead of a firm that's creating a digital replacement for drugs — is telling of where that value lies: Novartis' new collaboration allows it to operate in a treatment area it is already established in and potentially improve existing products. We expect pharma companies to continue to ink partnerships with DTx vendors that are creating products that supplement drugs.
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