[New Year Special] Rise of digital therapeutics to change healthcare scene for good!
My goal is to change the metrics and create significant value for our shareholders. In recent months ehave sold off the non-core assets in order to take the company in a new direction. The core assets we plan to keep and work on will be our ADHD products and the like. We plan to continue the development of these products with the Hospital for sick children in Toronto (SickKids). Our goal is to improve the lives of children and adults as we expand and monetize our business plan.
- CEO - Ben Kaplan
If a person gets sick, he or she visits a doctor, gets a prescription, takes it to pharmacies, and receives medications.
This is the way by which most people currently gets healthcare service and treat their illnesses. From now on, however, the rapid development of IT technology will bring about a new type of medicine -- digital therapeutics – on the healthcare industry.
Already, global health regulators have given the go-ahead to related software, such as clinical mobile apps and platforms used for medical treatments.
Digital therapies have shown efficacy, especially in the fields of treating brain nervous system, neuropsychiatric disorders, and drug addiction, which are difficult to treat with conventional treatments.
In the United States, where drug addiction is a serious social problem, clinically approved digital treatments have recently been undergoing the fast track system. The scheme allows an investigational drug to receive an expedited review to help speed up the development of medicines that treat a severe or life-threatening condition and fill an unmet medical need.
The first digital treatment that won the nod of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was a new platform called "reSET," in 2017.
The platform is an application that provides cognitive behavioral therapy, a psychiatric method of treating addiction symptoms. The app offers a way to get rid of loneliness so that the patients are not tempted to take drugs.
The FDA approved the platform after it showed impressive results in its clinical trial on 400 addicts. The trial showed that the patient group applied by conventional medication had an abstinence rate of 17.6 percent. In contrast, the group that used the reSET application displayed an abstinence rate of higher than 40 percent. Since then, various companies have dived into the field of digital therapeutics with the hope of developing new treatments for illnesses that have high unmet medical needs in the U.S.
According to the Biotech Policy Research Center, the market for digital therapeutics in the U.S. is expected to grow from $850 million in 2017 to $4.42 billion in 2023.
