(2017-04-07) Digital Treatments Can Be Real Medicine

Digital treatments can be real medicine. What if an app could replace a pill? That’s the big question behind an emerging trend known as “digital therapeutics.”

Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm, even predicts digital drugs will become “the third phase” of medicine, meaning the successor to the chemical and protein drugs we have now, but without the billion-dollar cost of bringing one to market.

Hames says digital therapies fall into two groups, which he calls “medication augmentation” and “medication replacement.”

The term digital therapeutics began to circulate around 2013, in large part due to Sean Duffy, CEO of Omada Health.

To distinguish themselves from “wellness” gadgets, digital therapeutics companies tend to carry out clinical trials and sometimes seek regulatory approvals –one company, Welldoc, offers a prescription-only version of its BlueStar phone app for managing diabetes, which it terms the “first FDA-cleared mobile prescription therapy.” But unlike drugs, digital therapeutics don’t usually need approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), since often they promote lifestyle or dietary changes that are deemed to be low-risk.

Steve Kraus, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, says he thinks digital therapeutics will be a “real thing, I really do,” but he says it’s not clear how many people will succeed with lifestyle intervention in the long run. Instead, he says, digital therapeutics used “in combination” with drugs, to make them work better, could be the idea’s sweet spot.

To win adoption, digital therapeutics companies have striven to mimic the drug industry’s practices and standards. Big Health, based in San Francisco, went as far as testing a placebo version of its insomnia app against the real thing.

Hames believes that someday digital therapeutics companies may even outstrip drug companies when it comes to evidence. “We’re digital, so we’re going to have a firehose of data,” he says.

But some digital therapies are already much cheaper than your average drug.

A notable difference is that insurance often pays most of the cost of drugs and insurers are still getting used to digital therapeutics.