Conference Presentation, Lecture, Keynote
a16z Podcast | The Genetics Of Drug Delivery
- The future of drug discovery will be fundamentally transformed by human genetics variations to optimize drug production, identify side effects and toxicity, and pursue new indications, with responses to drugs anticipated to resemble those of parents.
- An information system incorporating secure genomic knowledge will enable prescribers to determine which medications are most likely to be effective while minimizing adverse reactions.
- Pharmaceutical companies must integrate molecular-level signals with electronic medical record data to distinguish genuine findings from data artifacts and will need to analyze drug responses across multiple levels to optimize usage.
- Direct surveillance of patients using social media platforms, including Twitter and patient portals, will provide opportunities to track drug actions, capture patient preferences regarding symptoms, and identify new uses for existing drugs by analyzing side effects and interactions.
- Strong predictions regarding the efficacy of drugs in unapproved cancer indications, derived from integrated data streams, are expected to provide sufficient evidence to initiate clinical trials or support off-label physician judgment.
- Data science will become essential for discovering and optimizing drug use by converging multiple data sources over time to observe drug actions as patients are exposed to them.
- Despite the benefits of multi-source data integration, the current fragmented approach to data within pharmaceutical companies may not change immediately, though early adoption is argued to be necessary.
- The pharmaceutical industry faces the limitation of having a focused view that may obscure other potential applications of drugs, and the full description of drug actions for approved medications remains significantly limited.
- Significant challenges persist in processing social media text, specifically mapping informal terms, abbreviations, and slang to accurate medical concepts.