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| Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez |
As Big Pharma casts an eye toward med tech to diversify its offerings and capitalize on a growing market, Novartis ($NVS) is jumping on the bandwagon with new digital and patient monitoring devices.
Under the stewardship of Joe Jimenez, the Swiss drugmaker is forging ahead with multiple projects, including pills and inhalers with sensors to help patients stick to their meds; clinical tests that use Microsoft's ($MSFT) Kinect, a motion-sensing technology used with Xboxes, to track walking speed and balance in people with multiple sclerosis; and Google ($GOOG) contact lenses that can read diabetics' blood-sugar levels from their tears, a product that could end up transforming eyesight, Jimenez told Bloomberg.
In January, Novartis and Qualcomm ($QCOM) announced they would funnel up to $100 million into promising startups developing remote patient monitoring technology for smartphone and other devices. The same month, Novartis said it planned to use Qualcomm's Life2net cloud-based sharing platform in clinical trials to remotely collect data from patients' medical devices.
The move comes at a pivotal moment for Novartis, as the company recently completed a three-way asset swap with fellow pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK), inheriting the latter's stable of cancer drugs, handing GSK its vaccines unit and pooling its over-the-counter products including headache pill Excedrin. At least four of Novartis' top 10 drugs have lost or will lose patent protection in the next year, potentially endangering $10 billion in revenue, Bloomberg notes. New med tech offerings could bolster the company as it faces costly patent losses and setbacks for newer products, including a treatment for smoker's cough and two cancer drugs.
"Our view has to be based on how healthcare is going to change," Jimenez told the news outlet. "If you look at what led to the transformation that we just went through, it was a view of what's going to happen in 10 years externally."
And Novartis is not content to sit back with the status quo, eyeing more bolt-on acquisitions worth between $2 billion and $5 billion as it considers other companies with promising patient adherence technologies. "We would go in with a package of services including the pharmaceutical, the technology that will help that patient comply, a warning system that showed if that patient was not complying," Jimenez said. "We will have to partner with companies that have like interests in the tech space."
Meanwhile, other drugmakers are also looking for a piece of the med tech piece with their own projects and acquisitions. Last May, Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) launched a "gamified" app to track patients' health and provide a holistic view of their health efforts. Merck KGaA last year launched a new data collection tool for its best-selling MS drug Rebif. MSdialog, an Internet-based software system, syncs with a new RebiSmart auto-injector to instantly transmit information of patient injections to providers.
- read the Bloomberg story