What Wired Health 2022 talked about
During the day of work at Base Milano, 35 guests, Italian and international, alternated on stage. Central theme: how technology can help humans build better healthcare. In the background, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan that will bring to Italy at least 18.4 billion to invest in health care, about three more than expected according to an analysis by the Gimbe foundation presented in the morning by the president of the Gimbe foundation Nino Cartabellotta. “The PNRR - recalled Andrea Celli, CEO of Philips Italy, Greece and Israel - has an ambitious plan for healthcare. It aims to redesign our national health system, including with regard to infrastructure and access points. The risk is to be ready to announce tenders to respect the deadlines. Now there is also an inflationary risk: the NRP as a whole was worth 200 billion a year ago, today something less ".
If technology is the key to building the future of medicine, doing so with open source platforms can help ensure that inequalities can be reduced. "When we talk about artificial intelligence in healthcare, we must strive to create a system that is inclusive, without the inequalities we see now," warned Bart De Witte, founder of the Hippo AI Foundation, a non-profit based in Berlin that aims to making artificial intelligence in medicine a community asset. After all, Rolf Apweiler, director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory pointed out, "open access to the macromolecular structure and sequencing of data has been the key to predicting recent progress".
Today, explained Maria Raad, vp customer and digital strategy - commercial excellence of Janssen Emea, "technologies can help connect patients with the health care system in real time in order to guarantee more accurate answers, seamlessly and in the shortest possible time ". And Federico Protto, CEO of Retelit, highlighted that “in recent years the adoption by patients of digital tools has consolidated: the technologies were there even before, but they were not adopted; now there are regulatory and compliance issues that have not yet been completely resolved ". Even with the contamination of other scientific sectors, as Ian Postuma explained in a fascinating presentation on the role of neutrons in the treatment of cancer.
Data to develop predictive models Central element to obtain results is the power of the data that it also allows the development of predictive systems capable of seriously revolutionizing the world of medicine. Noemi Porrello, Roche's real world evidence lead, said that “data is the element to produce the evidence necessary to bring innovation to the system; the enabling element of a new way of managing medicine "and which allows" to combine traditional clinical research with all the information concerning the person in his dimensions ". Soon, added Nicoletta Luppi, president and CEO of Msd Italia, "it will be important to create an integrated ecosystem based on data, connect them to each other in order to accept the challenge of an integrated path of health management for individuals and communities".
An evident need in Italy as Walter Ricciardi, professor of Hygiene at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and advisor to the Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza, denounced in the closing panel in all these long months of Covdi pandemic -19: "We need to work on database interoperability", he added.
In Italy, explained Domenico Mantoan, general manager of Agenas, the national agency for regional health services, "we have an organizational model so the organization is at the head of the regions and this is a value. What the state and the regulatory agencies must do is determine rules to develop their health and information systems within rules that allow their interconnection ".
The data, as the experience of the platform demonstrates My doctor led by Luca Puccioni, allow us to put “at the center of the patient: the doctors - he said - did not use any technological support to keep track and process the patient's clinical history. Now the pandemic has accelerated this inevitable process ”. From the scientist's point of view, added Ennio Tasciotti, Human Longevity Program director of San Raffaele in Rome, thanks to the collaboration with the data, it will be possible to observe a series of objective data collected for example by wearable technologies or other digital diagnostic tests to access directly to this information "which will be able to best address" the doctor's therapeutic choice "to treat their patients" better thanks to data ".
Exploiting the NRR for good telemedicine As well as telemedicine, which has become part of the common language: “The patient - added Matteo Moscatelli, country head Vree Health of MSD salute - must not find a limit in technology, but understand its benefit. You need to be able to get information, but you need to exploit it with their consent to build value ". The need for home care, added Mattia Perroni, founder of Medicillo, "has existed for centuries but doing a medical examination at home is very complicated when it should be simple". Also because, as Sumita Singha, director of Ecologic Architects noted, "l home health care is effective for dealing with complex conditions of buildings that always remain the same and cannot change rapidly ".
Over time, explained Davide Tavaniello, CEO and co-founder of Hippocrates Holding, was a the pharmacy to shorten the distance with the doctor: "Even today the pharmacy carries out a public service the relationship between the pharmacist and the patient has replaced the relationship between patient and general practitioner for milder pathologies". wants to bet on technique, as Giorgio Casati dg of ASL Roma 2 said, we need to take advantage of the PNRR "to do a good telemedicine" and copy what others have already done: "Telemedicine - Ilan Misano, Medtech of the Italian technion association suggested - has been in use for about ten years: we can choose what works in other parts of the world and bring it to Italy". An example of digitization is Mediately.co, a platform at the service of doctors that allows them to obtain immediate and safe information on medicines: "We - explained Balz Triglav CEO of the company - help doctors to treat patients better, to make faster diagnoses and to learn more ".
New studies for doctors and companies of the future For Marco Francone, head of the Cardiovascular Imaging service at Humanitas, “the key to modern medicine is multidisciplinarity, not only between doctors but also with engineers and physicists. Technology - he said - is fundamental in medicine and cardiology but requires an initial filter that is clinical ". The direction of the future, he explained, is "the creation of very dedicated courses for professionals with a real degree in medicine with super specialized engineering skills". A path undertaken by Humanitas, which with the Politecnico di Milano has activated a degree course in Medtech. Simona Lodato, head of the Humanitas Neurodevelopment laboratory, recalled that during Medtech “what we intend to do is to create a different mindset, a type of transdisciplinary approach to overturn and reintegrate the various disciplines. Not just the sum of different topics, but a new discipline ".
Studies and roads that open up new options for the future especially for startups. "There is much more culture in doing research and development in the startup sector and there are more opportunities than before", said Paolo Fundarò, CEO of Genextra. And moreover, as Alessio Beverina, co-founder of the venture capital Panekes highlighted Partners, "in the last 6 years we have had about five thousand investment opportunities, of which a good 20% from Italy." After all, in Europe, added Raffaele Tordjman, founder and CEO of Jeito capital in a panel with the biotech made champion in Italy Pierluigi Paracchi, co-founder of Genenta Science listed on the Nasdaq, "we invest more and more and are of great interest to American investors, especially in biotech: in 10 years their investments have increased by 8 times".
In short, added Stefano Massaro, CEO of Cerba Healthcare Italia, “there are huge development prairies where young people have to aim: it is they who have to decide what will be done tomorrow. The patient is the beneficiary and the basis of everything we do because he is the one who offers the data on which the future and predictive medicine and the personalization of medicine are developed ". A hand will also come from the public: Enea Tech and Biomedical, the foundation managed by the Ministry of Economic Development with a dowry of 750 million euros, is ready to support "startups and SMEs that are sustainable and conducive to development, innovation is needed that satisfies a need ”, explained the managing director Marco Baccanti.
At this moment Giovanni Valbusa, AI R&D Manager of Bracco Imaging noted, “There are really a lot of investments in the use of artificial intelligence. But more could be done in imaging ”. According to the manager, the big players were missing and among the reasons there is the strict regulation of the biomedical sector: "An extremely regulated environment: you can't think of making an application and putting it in the hospital the next day, there are complex regulatory processes and expensive. This slows down the AI's entry to the hospital a bit ”. For Eugenio Santoro, head of the Medical Informatics laboratory of the Mario Negri Institute of Pharmacological Research, the real fascinating challenge is therefore precisely "doing clinical research to validate digital tools: to be able to distinguish an application that collects data as a medical tool is need to undergo clinical trials measuring safety and efficacy. And we can only measure it with the methodology used to measure the efficacy of pharmacological treatments ".
What future for rare diseases Focus also on rare diseases. "The moment I found myself a patient suffering from a rare tumor (5 cases per million people) I was catapulted into a world I didn't know existed", said Dario Bressanini, chemist, university professor and popularizer. scientific.
A rare disease highlighted Francesco Macchia, co-founder and CEO of RareLab, “is defined on the basis of its prevalence: 5 cases out of 10 thousand is the threshold. Currently there are about 7-8 thousand of them ". This is another reason why the need has been felt over the years for a law capable of protecting people affected by a rare disease. However, the text does not arrive: "This is the third legislature in which I am presenting a bill on rare diseases - said the senator of Forza Italia-Udc Paola Binetti - Each time we have tried to build a consensus and interest around pathologies".
Science works to make even the most complex diseases such as epilepsy less incapacitating. Fabrizio Caranci, executive director of Angelini Pharma, revealed that the disease affects “50 million people in the world, in Italy there are 500,000 and 30,000 every year. And technology can help a lot: smartwatches allow you to monitor patients in real time and report seizure markers. Having a timely patient diary that tries to give an objective connotation of the crisis can help identify the best treatments and speed up the management of the disease. And then exploiting machine learning algorithms will help predict "the onset of the disease.
