My Experience with ITC in Addiction Treatment

Unlike most other areas of clinical medicine over the past 80 years, addiction treatment programs have mostly developed apart from other areas of health care; they have not been greatly influenced by clinical and basic research. In essence, the worlds of translational clinical research and addiction treatment have had too few opportunities to learn from each other. Because of this, there are significant challenges in researching and developing products aimed at objectively diagnosing and treating addiction.

As a Ph.D. candidate, I was very fortunate to be involved with an NIH-funded interdisciplinary research program; the aim of our research was to develop objective measurements of recovery from opiate addiction. As a member of this group, I coordinated between my mentors at Penn State College of Medicine, professors at main campus, and clinicians at the Caron Foundation (a non-profit, residential addiction treatment facility). When I arrived on the project, my mentors had already been welcomed by the Caron Foundation, and my role was to implement the research protocol and act as the point man at Caron. As a quick outline, the study had three main goals: 1) developing a smart phone application that assesses mood in real time 2) using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) to assess brain function throughout the course of treatment, and most importantly 3) identifying biological markers to predict treatment outcome (e.g. what contributes to relapse after treatment). 

In this endeavor I was privileged to work with senior investigators that were open-minded and valued my input. Nevertheless, there are certain challenges faced whenever one coordinates a study of this magnitude, namely, communicating back and forth between academics and clinicians. In order to make sure this project got off the ground smoothly, I faced two dilemmas: I had to motivate workers on the clinical side to facilitate the research project (by increasing patient compliance), and I had to persuade the academic researchers to slightly alter the study protocol, thereby making the study easier to execute.

By tactfully informing those on the clinical side of the importance of our research, and explaining to those on the academic side that we need to refine our protocol, we were able to generate a better and more efficient research study that was ultimately more patient friendly. The study progressed ahead of schedule, and we feel that this research will have a major impact on healthcare policy for addiction treatment. In addition, the developments of our smart phone application and fNIR system have great potential to become marketable products in the future.

Alternative Funding for Drug Development

Can Mobile Applications aid in Drug Development?

We live in a time of unprecedented advances in biological science and technology. At the same time, in many potential areas of drug development, major drug companies have substantially reduced their investment in research and new product development. In many respects, the broad field of neuroscience has become a kind of poster child for underinvestment by a number of large pharmaceutical companies.  By default, these companies have delegated early-stage drug development to small, underfunded biotech firms. The latter often emerge from the laboratories of university-based neuroscientists; but, they lack the management and real world business skills essential to their present and future profitability.

At some level, one of the key barriers to early product development is the cultural gap between academics and the worlds of investment capital and big Pharma. As C.P. Snow pointed out in an earlier era (“The Two Cultures”), the worlds of science and its potential applications speak in very different languages. Indeed scientists often operate in their own silos’ (e.g. they rarely communicate outside of their own fields).

It may be time to start thinking of alternative ways to fund biotech startups. Crowd funding sites such as Kickstarter have been successful in funding a number of other businesses, but are rarely applied to biotech companies. This is likely because biotechs require an extremely large investment to make it through the "valley of death" i.e. from a novel molecular target to clinical trials. But what if there was an application that a) allowed scientists to grade potential drugs, and b) allowed the public to invest early on in the life cycle of the company? In this way, the public could be involved (and perhaps own early 'stock') in funding certain diseases/approaches and scientists could have more access to early stage work, potentially quickening the pace of drug development. 

Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my blog!

By way of introduction, I am a neuroscientist by training with an interest in the intersection of science, technology, and business. Moreover, I am very interested in pushing the field of personalized medicine forward, especially as a means to serve underrepresented populations. For instance, there is a large gap in the medical treatment of chronic illness depending on socioeconomic status. Much of this blog will focus on mobile technologies as a way to educate individuals suffering from chronic disease as well as mobile platforms that aid in day-to-day management of disease. Because mobile technologies allow for constant data collection, it is my hope that they might be useful in tailoring treatments for individuals in a way that is smart and effective.  I hope you enjoy these blog posts and I encourage discussion and feedback on any topic I bring up. Thanks for reading!

~Andrew Huhn