RE: Wearables24 Nov 2020 07:56
Hi BBD
The short answer to this is - if Apple, Amazon etc. want it - then they can definitely make it work.
The longer answer, including a fair bit of my own opinion, is this.
The tech companies will not be looking at this as a single transaction, i.e. 'we program the wearables with Orph's data then sell watches that give users health alerts'. They will look at this as the first step to an increasingly sensitive and accurate health service on your wrist.
As to how it works? Initially, they will want to use Orph's biomarkers in a fairly simple way. Orph's data will contain a baseline for each volunteer that has entered the clinic - essentially, what their stats are when they are healthy.
Orph then tracks their stats at each stage of illness/disease progression. I suspect very accurately. To the hour and quite possibly to the minute.
It is the differences between these that will create the basic algorithms. E.g. If your heart rate and blood pressure increase by x and y, while your 02 stats decrease by z then you might have... Very simple, might not sound too impressive, but no-one else has this.
Also this is only the first stage.
Over time, a company with 10s and 100s of thousands of wearable users can refine this data across a much larger set of users and, possibly, begin to categorise it further by age, ethnicity, level of fitness - whatever the user has signed up to disclose. But it can only reliably do this if it has access to clinical data to form the base model. Or at least it can do this more accurately and quickly if it has Orph's clinical data. If future challenge studies involve participants using wearables then this will accelerate the process.
At this point wearable diagnostics could become scarily accurate! With a large enough dataset you can start to spot amazing patterns.
I also have no doubt that these companies are looking even further ahead, to a point in the future when they may also have the genomic data of some users. At this point you are potentially spotting patterns between diseases and disease progression across specific genetic similarities, in very large groups of people. Again, Orph has the genomic data.
There is, potentially, a vast, vast amount of money here. The big tech/wearable companies are desperate to get into this space... and Orph has the only existing data of any scale in the world currently. It will provide one or more of these companies an enormous head start.
Finally, while I have no doubt that much of the immediate value may be in having the Covid trials data (and having the trials conducted with an Apple, Fitbit, Whatever on the participants wrist) the wearables companies will be looking further down the road too. They want the future data too - data gathered directly by their wearable in the trials.
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