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Mr. Traub, personalized medicine is not a new goal. Where do we stand in this area today?
That's right, the idea of personalized medicine isn't new to begin with. Paul Ehrlich, for example, spoke more than 100 years ago about magic bullets that are specifically aimed at pathogens. What was still a vision back then is now increasingly becoming a reality. Every day we understand better how diseases develop, how they progress and how they change over the course of the disease. At the same time, modern medicine offers more and more possibilities to specifically intervene in precisely these disease processes. Today we have antibody therapies, "tailored" small molecules, immunotherapies, cell and gene therapies - all cutting-edge treatment strategies precisely tailored to the biology of disease.
Head of the Medicine department at Roche Pharma AG.
(Photo: PR)
What do these advances mean for patients?
These advances offer patients with serious and unfortunately often life-threatening diseases one thing above all: a new perspective. Today, thanks to these new therapies, we are seeing treatment successes in some diseases, such as special forms of cancer or neurological diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy, that were hardly imaginable just a few years ago. On the other hand, our reality also means that so far only some patients have benefited from targeted and/or personalized therapies. We are far from where we want to be! However, if we consider the speed of innovation that we have reached in medicine today, we can be confident that treatments
Keyword “speed of innovation”: What role does digitization play in this?
The importance of digital transformation for medical progress is enormous in every respect. Let's stay in the field of research: Gaining medical knowledge has always been based on the analysis of large amounts of data. We now have the technologies to collect and connect more data in a structured way than ever before. We have intelligent algorithms and artificial intelligence that help us to extract medically relevant patterns from millions of data sets. And we are increasingly opening up new data sources, which not only provide us with new insights, but also offer the prospect of completely new therapeutic solutions.
For example?
Think, for example, of smartphones or wearables, millions of which are already being used today to monitor health-related data such as our blood pressure or blood oxygen levels in real time. These tools have long since arrived in medical research - and are also just beginning to make the leap into healthcare in this country. For example, together with a digital health partner, we developed an app that collects data on the well-being of cancer patients. And we were able to show that patients who used this application regularly ultimately survived longer. Because by collecting the data, the treating doctor could recognize much earlier if the health status was deteriorating - and then take appropriate therapeutic action.
Please click on the graphic to enlarge it.
(Photo: Roche)
How do you deal with concerns about the “transparent patient”?
First of all, there is no question that health data is an extremely sensitive commodity and the protection of personal data must have top priority. But that must not mean that we lock away health-related data and do not use it in the first place. After all, value creation and progress result from the fact that we link and network this data with each other. Medical research, for example, has no interest in personal data. This involves large, anonymous data sets that can be used, for example, to identify patterns in the course of treatment and disease. We also know that the majority of the population is perfectly willing to share health-related data - if it is clear with whom and for what purpose.
So does it need more clarification?
Without a doubt. - Education and building trust play a crucial role in this context. At the same time, however, we also need a social discourse that focuses on the value of data-based health care - and this beyond individual interests and above all beyond Orwellian dystopias, which only serve diffuse fears. Because in the end, sovereignty over our own data lies with each of us. In return, this also means that each of us must ask ourselves the question: What am I willing to contribute to my own health? And what am I willing to contribute to general medical progress?
Finally, let's take a look into the crystal ball: What could the healthcare of the future look like?
That depends on how we set the course for the future today. If we use technological progress, remove hurdles and consistently rely on exchange and networking, we can already build a learning healthcare system that generates new knowledge for the future with every treatment today. Not only would this exponentially accelerate progress in research, but above all it would also help more and more patients to receive personalized treatment in the true sense of the word: treatment that uses collective knowledge from millions of pieces of data and experience to, in turn, to focus on individual people with their individual needs. Ultimately, this will also lead to a new understanding of healthcare: While the focus today is still primarily on the reactive treatment of diseases, we will be able to prevent serious diseases more and more often in the future. Or to put it another way: We will actively manage health.
