Page 10 - Spring_2022

The long read
State of digital adoption in Healthcare in UK and Europe
When we started investing in healthcare 25 years ago (15 for digital health), opportunities were limited. There has since been an explosion of entrepreneurial activity, especially since Covid-19. A number of digital health unicorns now exist in Europe with more and more dedicated digital health or health tech funds being established.
Albion’s focus is mostly in B2B, particularly the pharmaceutical industry (Digital Pharma) and healthcare providers (Digital Care). Looking at Digital Pharma first - the graphic below provides our view of the state of technology adoption.
Digital Pharma: State of technology adoption
Clinical trials was the first part that saw strong adoption of digital. Clinical development is the largest segment in terms of revenues by pharma technology vendors and we expect it to continue to grow strongly following the leapfrog that happened with Covid-19.
A segment that is still underpenetrated but with
huge potential for digital growth is marketing and sales. The current “hottest” segment is early-stage pharmaceutical research and the many start-ups trying their luck with AI drug discovery. While it receives a lot of interest and with some notable successes, the size of the segment in revenues generated from the sale of digital technology is still small.
Discovery
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Launch
Growth/ Life Cycle Management
Research Pre-clinical
Clinical Development
Marketing & Sales
Target discovery, assay development, in vitro testing, in vivo testing (animal studies)
Design trial, patient enrolment, trial ops & monitoring, data capture, analysis and regulatory submission
Market intelligence, health economics, RWE, stakeholder engagement, marketing, detailing
Mostly discovery
(e.g. AI discovery, high throughput screening)
Elements of patient enrolment, trial monitoring and submission
Very limited, still highly manual non-scalable processes
AI drug discovery
- Target discovery / computational biology
- Drug repurposing
- Lead / synthesis optimisation
LS tools, Lab automation Synthetic biology
Patient recruitment
Patient engagement & outcomes
Electronic data capture De-centralised / virtual trials
Real world evidence (RWE)
KOL, Prescriber, patient engagement / “big data” analytics
Activities description
Current Tech adoption
Start-up/ scale-up focus
Company examples (Europe)
10 Albion news | Spring 2022