00:00:00:01 - 00:00:15:14
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
So a number of our clients talked to us about patients and patient centricity, and we all know how important patients are, but we also know how difficult it is to operationalise. So I'm wondering how does that kind of what's your views on this?
00:00:16:23 - 00:00:44:19
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
I find it really interesting that we've been talking about patients for years across the pharmaceutical industry and we know they're important. But actually working out how to make a difference is really the challenge. So I heard a mid-sized pharma CEO recently say that if we failed to listen to patients, we will fail to make commercial success of our products and to place them appropriately and to get adoption, which is amazing.
So LifeArc is not a product deliverer today, so our duty is to listen to patients right at the beginning, and that's what we do. So for our translational challenges, these are multi-project programmes that are formed around a central patient problem or a central patient group. So we can take many examples of that, but we actually pull our patients together with their clinicians and we say to them, of all the things that could help you on your patient journey, what is it that we could help you with?
And we get a range of answers from, well, my diagnosis was terrible, took a long time. I went from pillar to post and nobody understood my multitude of symptoms. I know my patient journey is going to go in this direction. I would love to have some devices to help me with it, or if only I’d had that information and I could have done so much better and got fast track to where I needed to go or to the community that will help me deal with my disease.
00:01:57:24 - 00:02:24:00
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
And it goes on like this that they don't just ask for cues and for LifeArc this is an opportunity because we are not just producers of therapies or diagnostic or devices or information. We are actually looking at whole 4Ds pulled together with digital and data. So that's very exciting for us and it gives us short term goals as well as long term goals for these patients.
00:02:24:23 - 00:02:48:16
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
It's interesting because obviously you've mentioned that you are a translation company and one of the big questions that we get from our clients is how early should I be doing this? And I know that obviously things change over time and you get new treatments come along, new diagnostics come along. But I think it's fascinating that you have made the active choice to start to consider the patients, right at the beginning.
I'd be interested in your view of some examples of where you think it's really essential for that to happen. And I know we've talked before about maybe paediatrics, for example.
00:03:01:07 - 00:03:33:09
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Absolutely. One of the future translation challenges that we're thinking about is paediatric oncology. And when I speak to parents of children who have had paediatric cancer or have been lost to paediatric cancer, it's quite clear that some of the very well-informed ones who are actually working in life sciences have campaigned, for example, that human genome sequencing becomes available to children with cancer.
But one of the latest conversations I've had is that, yes, even if you've got the genome sequence, there's not that connectivity of the sequence and what that means for the physicians to treat children. So whenever we ask a central question, we find there are gaps between the things you can do and the utility of the information you generate.
And that is just a typical example of why LifeArc thinks that there is room to really make a difference. We understand that you can make provision and you can generate data, but if you can't actually translate that into something meaningful for the care that's given to the children in this case, you haven't done a thorough job. So that's exactly the type of catalytic world we want to live in and build the ecosystem to make the difference.
00:04:28:14 - 00:04:50:09
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
So maybe just understanding better the genetics, the genetic code that the genome sequence is telling you about and actually then persuading therapies to be built that will answer some of those specific problems. Maybe that's an area that does seem to be the paediatric oncology. One example.
00:04:50:20 - 00:05:17:09
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
That's fascinating. Thank you for explaining that because it's something that we hear a lot as well, is that people don't always understand what to do with the insights that's generated. And it's something that we're trying to work through, is to how do you help people from across the entire, like a company or an ecosystem, really capitalise on the data and the information and the knowledge that they have and then be able to apply it.
00:05:18:08 - 00:05:41:14
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
They tell us amazing things about their experience as patients, and it turns out that whilst we might think that they'd like the ultimate cure, which inevitably they would, there's also many things we can do throughout their journey to help them considerably. So, for example, let's say my diagnostic journey was awful. I was moved from pillar to post. I need help. Can you can you make that a clear path to see the specialist?
00:05:47:19 - 00:05:57:08
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
Do you remember we did that work with you, with the patient groups that was with the cystic fibrosis team. How has that kind of evolved over time?
00:05:57:23 - 00:06:25:23
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Well, that's been particularly interesting because we had the first meeting that Baringa helped facilitate for us with patients and their clinicians, and these were cystic fibrosis and non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis sufferers, and they told us that, yes, we do want cures, and we do want to stop getting infections, but they said the real need is the exacerbations can come at any time.
We can live our lives, not plan a thing, and suddenly we go down with an exacerbation. What we really would love is to know when that's about to happen, to try and head it off the path so we don't end up back in hospital.
00:06:43:03 - 00:07:10:16
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
And do you think there's being enough done about that? So obviously it comes back to your point about ecosystem. We've got drugs, devices, we've got digital, we've got all this data, we've got patients in the mix, health care professionals, all these different players, they're all getting involved. How do we navigate all of this and what do you think is needed within a kind of national environment like we are here in the UK.
00:07:11:02 - 00:07:43:16
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
So the UK has a wonderful research base and often that's focussed around very key charities like Cancer Research UK or research institutions like the Dementia Research Institute. And obviously the Medical Research Council is one of the key players in funding that. So this wonderful research base is it's something to be helped and to be drawn upon. So LifeArc positions itself as the translation partner alongside these organisations and we love that because we're not the disease experts.
00:07:43:23 - 00:08:07:08
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
So they have so much to give from large to small charities or large to small research centres. They have so much to give and if you include them with the patients, you find you've got disease experts at the mechanistic level with patients, with their clinicians, and LifeArc as a catalyst to bring them together and have the conversation.
We then go on and because of our science advice and funding skill base, we then become intimately involved not only as catalysts but as part of the contributors to that ecosystem.
00:08:21:15 - 00:08:30:09
Kate Moss, Partner and Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences expert, Baringa
Thank you so much, Melanie, for such a really interesting discussion. I'm very grateful. It's been great to hear the progress and also to understand a lot more about what LifeArc are doing.
00:08:31:05 - 00:08:31:23
Dr Melanie Lee, CEO, LifeArc
Thank you, Kate.
