Plenge Lab
Date posted: January 6, 2019 | Author: | No Comments »

Categories: Drug Discovery Embedded Genomics Human Genetics

[I am an employee of Celgene. All views expressed here are my own.]

At the 2018 Annual Atlas Ventures Retreat (AVR), I participated in a panel on Digital Health (along with David Schenkhein, John Reed, Scott Brun). The panel discussion was led by Michael Ringel, who also provide an excellent introduction to Digital Health (his slides here). While there are many aspects to digital health, we focused on the application to drug discovery and development.  In this blog, the main point I want to emphasize is that I believe that the digital health tipping point will occur when products that benefit patients (e.g., therapeutics) facilitate the integration of digital health initiatives that currently reside in silos.

What is digital health in relation to drug discovery & development? There are many different definitions with many different components, and this, in essence, is part of the challenge (see Figure below). In early discovery biology, digital health represents various data types (e.g., human genetics, ‘omics data, cell models) and analytical methods (e.g., simple regression, machine learning, artificial intelligence).  In late discovery biology, digital health includes sophisticated analytical methods for in silico drug design and organoid models to recapitulate the human system for pre-clinical testing.…

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