Entrepreneurs are betting on apps that improve—or just replace—prescription medication.
What if an app could replace a pill? That’s the big question behind an emerging trend known as “digital therapeutics.” The idea: software that can improve a person’s health as much as a drug can, but without the same cost and side-effects.
Digital therapeutics, or “digiceuticals,” as some call them, have become a Holy Grail in some quarters of Silicon Valley, where investors see the chance to deliver medicine through your smartphone. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm, even predicts digital drugs will become “the third phase” of medicine, meaning the successor to the chemical and protein drugs we have now, but without the billion-dollar cost of bringing one to market.
“It’s going to seem backwards and even barbaric that our solution to everything was just giving out pills,” partner Vijay Pande wrote on the investment company’s blog .
But defining exactly what a digital therapeutic actually is can be as elusive as finding the famous chalice. “It’s still a fluid space that everyone is trying to categorize,” says Peter Hames, the British CEO of a startup called Big Health, which offers an online therapy program for insomnia suffers called sleep.io that it claims can replace “pills or potions” with visualization exercises.
Hames says digital therapies fall into two groups, which he calls “medication augmentation” and “medication replacement.” He says sleep.io is in the latter category because it actually makes sleeping pills unnecessary. “We’ve been able to show through multiple peer-reviewed studies that the outcomes are better than drugs,” he says.
The term digital therapeutics began to circulate around 2013, in large part due to Sean Duffy, CEO of Omada Health. He began using it at conferences and in the company’s marketing materials to describe its online coaching software to help pre-diabetics avoid getting sick by exercising more and losing weight.
About a dozen startups now call themselves digital therapeutics providers, and say they’re distinct from the rest of the digital health market of activity monitors, smart scales, and sleep trackers.
To distinguish themselves from “wellness” gadgets, digital therapeutics companies tend to carry out clinical tests and sometimes seek regulatory approvals –one company, Welldoc, offers a prescription-only version of its BlueStar phone app for managing diabetes, which it terms the “first FDA-cleared mobile prescription therapy.
