Improving Patients’ Lives and Boosting Mature Product Portfolios

easypod-an automated drug delivery device manufactured by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany for its recombinant human growth hormone, Saizen-is the only electronic, fully automated injection device for growth hormone therapy. Its features include automated dose delivery and prescription tracking, which records injection history and any missed injections, and allows patients to know when to change their

Simon Sturge, Chief Operating Officer, Biopharma, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

cartridge by displaying how much medicine is left in the device.

Speaking to Pharm Exec, Merck KGaA’s Chief Operating Officer of Biopharma, Simon Sturge, outlines the device’s development and highlights its position in the context of a changing treatment-adherence landscape that could bring benefits both to patients and mature product portfolios.

PE: Are digital interventions in patient adherence becoming more of a focus at your company?

STURGE: Absolutely. We are a major player in the area of diabetes, for example, and as we all know, lifestyle has a huge impact on the outcome of diabetes. How much we as a company should be able to offer a whole package that helps to support the lifestyle changes needed is a very important element of us preventing or delaying the onset of diabetes. In other areas, many people who are sick have a degree of depression. There are excellent apps that are reimbursed in some countries to help treat depression, and those sorts of things should be offered as part of a solution. We believe it is an essential part of our business to look holistically at the patient and bring to that patient as many practical things as possible to help them overcome their disease.

However, innovative drugs are also at the core of what we do. A few years ago, we established a clear strategy of driving innovation in the area of specialty products. This has taken quite some time from an R&D perspective, but it is now coming to fruition, with a focus on the areas of oncology, immuno-oncology, and immunology. We have a number of exciting innovative products coming to market, and what we’re also seeing is substantial growth on the portfolio of our established products, one of which is our growth hormone, Saizen.

PE: How much did you incorporate patients’ adherence behaviors in developing easypod?

STURGE: Quite a few of our products are biotech products that need to be given via injection. Understanding the patient need around that product, how they inject, what the issues are, particularly for children, has helped drive our e-health and digital platform. We have a number of different applications around our growth hormone product, but the most sophisticated is easypod. The device sends administration data such as time and dose to the cloud via a mobile device or home network, and then shares that data with the treating physician or carer, to be able to understand the usage of that product.

There are digital ways that you can track people and their activities, of course, but what we’ve found is that you can’t beat having somebody almost living with a patient. In some circumstances we do that. We use an external group, and they send an observer to stay with a family for several days to really understand the

practical issues that surround the use of the product. It’s those kinds of insights that really help to provide solutions that are practical and that address genuine issues that the patient wants to overcome. 

Adherence in using an injectable product in a chronic environment can be very low, as low as 25%, but we’ve seen in controlled studies that with easypod that we can take that up to close to 90%.

[Ramy Sourial, growth hormone franchise director at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, adds: We worked with patient organizations and healthcare providers at different stages of planning the device, and we used focus groups and market researchers to identify the needs. During development, we conduct regular tests to check that we are on the right track. And when the product is on the market, we continue to improve the device, even small things like designing covers and designing smaller needles.]

PE: Can this higher adherence be sustained in a real-world setting?

STURGE: We’re moving to very elegant devices, more universal devices; physicians and caregivers are becoming a lot more comfortable using the data that is generated. Where the big transition needs to take place is still with the payers. The NHS (National Health Service) is one of the most sophisticated providers in terms of understanding usage of products on a more holistic basis and has a willingness to work with the pharma industry on pricing and payment mechanisms that ultimately link efficacy with payment. As governments, payers, and the industry work more closely together, this will be of benefit to all parties and especially patients. 

Our responsibility as a pharma company is broader than just supplying the drug. We have worked with the NHS on schemes where they only pay if the drug is used. If adherence levels are low, they don’t pay. In some of the pilot schemes with the NHS in a real-world setting, we were getting those adherence rates of close to 90%; we think that is quite achievable in everyday use. But there’s always things you can add, adding digital gains into these things to encourage children to use these devices on a daily basis; it’s a dynamic process and our aim is to try and maintain these increased adherence rates. 

PE: What would you say are the remaining challenges in patient adherence?

STURGE: One of the biggest challenges we face is data privacy, the different data privacy laws country by country. If you end up having to develop software that has to be different in every country, it becomes less meaningful. Respecting and understanding data privacy but having a broader global alignment on data privacy laws in our industry will help everybody.

It will remain a sticking point for quite some time; it’s a highly complex and politically emotive subject, for very good reasons. But our concern isn’t around data privacy, per se-it’s consistency of the regulations thereof. 

Julian Upton is Pharm Exec’s European and Online Editor. He can be reached at julian.upton@ubm.com