Heather Barnes, external innovation lead EMEA at Johnson and Johnson Consumer Health, is a scientist who is truly passionate about consumer health. With her background in biochemistry and eye for identifying innovation trends, the future is bright at Johnson & Johnson Innovation.

After making her way from early-stage drug development research to her current role, Heather got straight to work on creating sustainable collaborations that made life better for people and their families.

I am fascinated by the breadth of my role, which encompasses self-care products, skin health, sustainability and much more. From the very beginning, I thought, ‘Right, I love this! It’s fast paced, challenging and something that I can put my experience toward.

Heather shared some of the exciting developments underway at Johnson & Johnson, including the company’s refreshed strategic innovation priorities and $800 million commitment to the Healthy Lives Mission for a healthy planet.

Having a real impact on consumers

A biochemist by background and training, Heather’s academic path included partnering with AstraZeneca in Sweden for her masters,  carrying out novel research as an early-stage drug discovery scientist. She considered several options as graduation neared, driven by her desire to see the impact of her work on consumers’ lives. Her top, and as it happened final, choice was Johnson and Johnson Consumer Health’s newly launched R&D Leadership Development Program.

Heather was one of two graduates hired into the programme, which entailed three different year-long roles. She rotated through regulatory affairs, external innovation, and self-care R&D. Upon completing the programme, she was thrilled to be offered her current position in external innovation.

Heather’s passion for integrated wellness goes beyond her day-to-day responsibilities. A true advocate for diversity and inclusion, she also sits on the EMEA Leadership Team for Johnson & Johnson’s LGBT+ employee resource group. She is continually seeking to partner with start-ups, academia and VCs as a core part of identifying innovations and developing external partnerships for Consumer Health, which includes self care, skin health and essential health.

The rapidly evolving consumer health space

Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health focuses its external innovation efforts on Self Care, which consists of allergy, smoking cessation, pain, digestive health, and cough and cold; and Skin Health, which includes acne, sensitive skin, skin protection and aging skin support. Each has its own innovation priorities, based on strong science and consumer need and these interests currently include novel delivery forms in allergy, devices for pain treatment and chronic pain solutions. Across all of its Self Care work, the priorities are connected at home devices, digital therapeutics and sensors for clinically relevant biomarkers. Technologies that are key across both Self Care and Skin Health include digitally enabled personalised solutions, new business models and sustainability solutions.

Within global external innovation the pharma, medical devices and consumer health businesses of Johnson and Johnson share the mission to innovate to transform health for humanity. The innovation centres are the collaborative interface with the external innovation ecosystem, bringing together the business development, JJDC corporate venture capital and JLABS incubator teams to accelerate the best science around the world. Between the distinct teams lie common interests that enable them to look at various technologies from diverse points of view and discover any correlations or commonalities across the different business areas.

In this webinar, moderated by Jonah Comstock, Editor-in-Chief at pharmaphorum, senior members from Healthware Group will discuss the key trends and developments set to shape the industry and present their predictions for the year ahead.

Join them on Friday 21 January at 2.00pm CET to find out how life science companies can stay ahead of the competition in 2022.

Plus, webinar attendees will have the opportunity to receive a free copy of the newly published book by Healthware’s CEO Roberto Ascione, “The Future of Health, How Digital Technology Will Make Care Accessible, Sustainable, and Human”, which expands on these topics (while supplies last).

In this Spotlight on Frontiers Health 2021, we present notable highlights and discussions from the conference, including resources from pharmaphorum and Frontiers Health and expert insight and analysis from those driving digital health adoption in life sciences.

With no precedent set for such a dramatic transformation, the acceleration of digital health adoption during the Covid-19 pandemic has driven creative thinking across the life science industry. As part of this spotlight, we get an insider look at the future of innovation in digital health and why companies are moving away from siloed development strategies in favour of cross-department collaboration.

Discover more at pharmaphorum.com

It’s long been known that many people struggle to access, understand and use health information and services to make decisions about their health.

As the WHO noted in 2013: “Knowledge societies in the 21st century confront a health decision-making paradox. People are increasingly challenged to make healthy lifestyle choices and manage their personal and family journeys through complex environments and health care systems but are not being prepared or supported well in addressing these tasks.”

Just how unprepared people are has been laid bare time after time. According to the 2012 European Health Literacy Survey, 29% to 62% of people across eight EU member states had inadequate or problematic health literacy.

And that’s before national television briefings began on COVID’s ‘R number’, an ever-mutating set of restrictive rules and an evolving understanding of the science behind a novel coronavirus first identified on 7 January 2020.

Alongside COVID’s devastating effects, 2020 also saw a raging misinformation pandemic as fake science and conspiracy theories spread rampantly online, often peddled by those in power, such as the former US president Donald Trump.

In times of uncertainty and ‘fake news’, it is our responsibility to provide guidance and clarity to our patients and consumers

Read the full article at www.pharmaphorum.com

This year, Frontiers has been a global Hybrid conference. In line with the “new normal” situation, the format of the 2020 edition has been hybrid, combining online global streaming together with offline events and activities held at hubs in multiple locations such as Italy, Germany, Finland, Spain, the USA, Switzerland and more.

It has been dedicated to digital health innovation in the context of the “new normal”, focusing on telemedicine, digital therapies, breakthrough technologies, patient-centricity, healthcare transformation and ecosystem development.

You can read the full live coverage on the pharmaphorum dedicated pages: Day 1 – Day 2

The year before, all the chatter was focused on the company’s secret healthcare team and the disruptive potential of this, as-yet-unknown, unit. Then all the behind-the-scenes work started paying off.

Twelve months later and the company had made a series of high-profile healthcare appointments, moved into the medical retail sector, made further moves in digital health and established a joint venture with a blue-sky mission.

Keeping up this pace in 2019 would have been surprising, and the company looks to be letting last year’s deals and launches bed-in, but it did make one very interesting, voice-activated move this month.

Its smart-speaker Alexa significantly ramped up its healthcare potential after it gained the ability to transmit and receive health information in line with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and its data privacy and security provisions.

To showcase the new functionality, Amazon signed up a number of healthcare providers, payers, pharmacy benefit managers and digital health coaching companies to launch six new Alexa healthcare skills.

They allow certain users of the device to do things like ask Alexa when their prescription delivery will arrive, to schedule a doctor’s appointment and even check their last blood sugar reading and provide trend information on their blood sugar measurements.

Amazon’s first partners for this new type of Alexa healthcare skill are pharmacy services organisation Express Scripts, health service company Cigna, healthcare networks Providence St. Joseph Health and Atrium Health, digital health company Livongo and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Boston Children’s Hospital has long believed that voice technology has the potential to substantially improve the healthcare experience for both consumers and clinicians

John Brownstein is chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, whose My Children’s Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) skill allows patients and caregivers to easily share recovery progress with their care team post-surgery.

Boston Children’s Hospital has long believed that voice technology has the potential to substantially improve the healthcare experience for both consumers and clinicians, he said. We began this journey with one of the first Amazon Alexa skills from a hospital four years ago and are thrilled to participate in the initial launch of Amazon Alexa’s HIPAA-eligible service for developers.

The hospital’s new Alexa healthcare skill was, he added, “just one example of how voice technology can extend the care and support of our patients beyond the four walls of the hospital”.

As a US-only, invite-only programme, it’s yet to fully hit the mainstream, but the direction of travel is clear to see, with Boston Children’s Hospital not the only organisation to have launched Alexa healthcare projects in recent years.

Others include a first aid skill from the Mayo Clinic and an information skill from WebMD in 2017 and a healthcare information skill from Cigna that arrived last year. The Answers by Cigna skill provides brief answers to more than 250 of the most commonly-asked healthcare questions and aims to improve the public’s health literacy.

With over 20% of Americans owning a voice-activated smart speaker, of which Amazon’s Echo is currently the most popular, there’s a good chance it could help with this, given that one third of adults in the US have either basic or below basic abilities to deal with health information, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Amazon’s healthcare plans and projects

The development of Alexa as a source for health information and tools is just one strand of Amazon’s efforts in healthcare and looking at its achievements in 2018 that I briefly mentioned above gives a sense of the scale at which it wants to operate within healthcare – and perhaps pharma.

The tech giant’s commerce roots were evident in its $1 billion acquisition of US online pharmacy PillPack last summer. The deal with PillPack could disrupt the traditional pharmacy market by delivering pre-sorted medicines and refills to customers’ doors and Amazon also showed interest last year in India’s second-largest pharmacy MedPlus.

It followed those activities with the October launch of an exclusive range of diabetes and hypertension devices. The Choice devices, produced by healthcare consultancy the Arcadia Group, included blood glucose monitors, blood pressure monitors and test strips to help people manage their conditions at home.

Amazon also began selling an exclusive line of Perrigo OTC products as part of its Basic Care range in a move that, as Business Insider suggested, could help strengthen the company’s association with healthcare in consumers’ minds.

Intrigued by this article? Read the full version at pharmaphorum.com

Eleven years is a long time to be writing about ‘digital pharma’, and I do indeed remember when it was all My First Twitter Account and iPhone Apps as far as the eye could see.

Over those years some technologies have entered the digital health mainstream, while others have failed to live up to their promise, never emerging from what Gartner’s Hype Cycle terms the Trough of Disillusionment.

Stuck in those doldrums we might find, amongst others, Google Glass, Google’s smart contact lens and Nokia’s digital health ambitions, but one tech sector that is living up to the hype is artificial intelligence (AI).

It has certainly featured on its fair share of ‘next big thing in health tech’ lists over the years, but the last few months have seen a real sense of momentum build around the area.

To stick with Gartner’s Hype Cycle model for a moment, AI in pharma and healthcare is being rapidly driven up by what the consultants term the Slope of Enlightenment and towards the Plateau of Productivity.

Gathering pace

The headwinds for this were certainly there in 2018, when all the signs were that AI in pharma was on the rise.

For healthcare systems the focus is on faster, more effective diagnosis and the cost-savings in treatment – and health benefits – that catching diseases early could bring.

Working on this are companies like Ultromics, whose AI system was developed by researchers at a UK hospital to analyse scans for signs of heart disease and lung cancer and has seen it become one of the ten most funded medical AI start-ups.

Sitting alongside Ultronics on that list are the likes of China’s Infervision, which late last year started working with 280 hospitals in its home market to detect cancer from image scans. There’s also Arterys, which won FDA clearance in 2018 for a suite of AI oncology applications that help clinicians measure and track tumours or potential cancers.

Medical imaging has become the bellwether application for AI technologies in healthcare, noted Frost & Sullivan last summer. From deep learning and machine learning approaches, to cognitive computing, to even natural language processing, several AI approaches are now being incorporated in the field of radiology.

Meanwhile, industry attention is predominantly focused on using AI to improve R&D success rates, including pharma titans like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), both of which signed AI deals last year.

Pfizer tied up with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based XtalPi to work on molecular modelling software that can be applied to drug-like small molecules and GSK signed a deal with the US-based AI-driven drug design and development company Cloud Pharmaceuticals for the design of novel small-molecule agents to GSK-specified targets.

And they were far from alone in pursuing this direction in 2018.

Novo Nordisk is working with e-Therapeutics, hoping the UK biotech’s AI-based drug discovery technology will help it find new therapies for type 2 diabetes; Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma and Hitachi are collaborating on AI technology in drug development; and AI firm Lantern Pharma has joined Genomics England’s ground-breaking 100,000 Genomes Project industry partnership.

Discover more about moving pharma and healthcare AI to the next level at pharmaphorum.com

Blockchain could revolutionise the way patients think about their clinical data, allowing them to control who uses it and receiving financial rewards for participating in trials

It’s easy for patients with serious diseases to feel like they have been hit with a perfect storm, particularly in the US where they must often pay for part or all of their care for themselves, as well as contending with the debilitating symptoms of their condition.

Finding ways for patients with diseases such as cystic fibrosis (CF) to make a living for themselves is therefore a priority for families who are under pressure to make ends meet, as well as deal with a loved one who is faced with condition that has serious implications for their daily lives.

While a new generation of drugs is offering fresh hope for CF patients, CysticFibrosis.com founder Jeanne Barnett argues that blockchain could help patients and families overcome some of the financial difficulties that can cause serious problems with everyday life.

For the uninitiated, blockchain ensures that data is original, and not tampered with.

Under blockchain records are kept and maintained across a whole network of computers and this database is jointly managed across the entire system. A public blockchain has “decentralised governance”, which means everyone agrees on his own whether or not to support the updates.

Our model is more ethical than current methods where patients are not compensated and sometimes not even informed their data is being sold

While it was initially used in cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin, the principle of blockchain can be used to allow patients to give access to anonymous medical information for the purpose of clinical trials, and in return allow them to be paid for doing so.

Read the full interview at pharmaphorum.com

As part of the Frontiers agenda I was invited to run a live (and now on-demand) video roundtable with Oliver Stohlmann from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer’s John Gordon, Sammeli Liikkanen from Orion Corporation and AstraZeneca’s Roeland van der Heiden.

These heads of innovation, communication and digital strategy formed an expert panel to explore how digital is impacting pharma, covering both the digital customer/consumer and the digitalisation of the product.

‘Digital’ is, of course, very broad in healthcare and can be applied in communications, new ways of diagnosing, patient engagement, technological interventions and many more areas. We started out looking at the way that pharma uses digital to communicate.

Oliver Stohlmann, global head of external innovation communication at Johnson & Johnson, began the session by noting the transition he’s seen in the industry’s use of digital:

Very early on in my career, working as an agency consultant, I remember making the case to big pharma clients for investing in the web when it first emerged, only to hear that a wait-and-see approach was being preferred, since many weren’t sure about this novel phenomenon called a web site!

“Fast-forward to today and communications are much more integrated and digitally-enabled. We have realised in many industries that the way to keep people engaged is to create experiences, dialogue and tell stories”.

It’s an area where some feel our industry still needs to catch up.

Roeland van der Heiden, digital director of corporate affairs at AstraZeneca, said:

The development of new communications platforms is as important for pharma as for society in general, but the industry has lagged behind in its use of them to date.

Read the full post on Paul Tunnah’s LinkedIn Pulse

Europe has a promising and rapidly-developing health innovation sector and, as Healthware founder and CEO Roberto Ascione tells pharmaphorum, an ecosystem approach is crucial to continuing the digital transformation of health.

Over the last few years the healthcare sector has been going through a fundamental transformation the world over as stakeholders grapple with how best to use digital technology.

Europe is no exception, and the region has been gradually increasing its focus on the digital area, driven by the strong institutional support for telemedicine, remote monitoring, big data-enabled personalised screenings and – soon – the adoption of artificial intelligence-based solutions for improving prevention and diagnosis procedures.

Someone who knows the European health innovation scene better than most is Roberto Ascione, a serial entrepreneur and global thought leader in digital health who’s also the founder and CEO of next-gen health consultancy Healthware Group.

The digital health scene in Europe is still very young with many challenges to be addressed and issues to be solved,- he notes. Among the most important players are, of course, the European institutions committed to promoting the digitisation of the sector, and the pharmaceutical companies that continue to work to innovate their products and services.

Read the full article on deep-dive.pharmaphorum.com