Developing digital therapeutics with KYAN Technologies' Prof. Dean Ho
Developing digital therapeutics with KYAN Technologies' Prof. Dean Ho
Episode show notes and transcript
About The Guest
Prof. Dean Ho is the Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) and The N.1 Institute for Health, and one of the Scientific Co-Founders of KYAN Technologies. KYAN Technologies is a leader in functional precision medicine for oncology, and aims to enhance drug development and delivery, developing novel biopharmaceutical assets and expanding drug use.
📄 Summary
Prof. Dean Ho is the Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) and The N.1 Institute for Health, and one of the Scientific Co-Founders of KYAN Technologies. In this episode, Prof. Ho discusses the importance of accessibility and community in fostering innovation. He highlights the role of academia in bridging the gap between innovation and real-world impact. Prof. Ho also shares his experience in setting up a biotech company in both the US and Singapore, emphasizing the ease and agility of the Singaporean ecosystem. He discusses the opportunities for AI in healthcare, particularly in clinical trial design and digital therapeutics. Prof. Ho also mentions the importance of a human talent pipeline to support the growing biotech industry in Singapore.
🥡 Key Takeaways
Singapore's ecosystem provides accessibility and community support for innovation in biotech.
Patients are different from each other and can be different from themselves across time. Personalized medicine should try to address individual-level differences.
Clinical trial design innovation is crucial for accelerating the validation of therapies.
Digital therapeutics have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by providing remote interventions.
💬 Quotes
“The graveyard of healthcare innovation is completely full of solutions that all address unmet medical needs.”
"One of the most pivotally important to-dos for the field, not only here but worldwide, is clinical trial design innovation. When COVID happened, decentralizing trials was at the forefront, because patients couldn’t get everywhere they needed to be.”
“Truly personalized medicine, at least to us, is dynamic. The best dose for a patient on a Monday may be different for the very same patient the following Monday.”
“Optim.AI takes kind of a phenotypically driven, an outcomes-driven approach to design those combinations. It does not use synergy modeling, doesn't use the same type of data, and again, it doesn't use population based drug interaction data to derive combos. It's truly n of one.”
“Digital therapeutics is not the same as popping a pill. Typically, we pop a pill, we move on with our day. Digital therapy requires considerations of adherence, behavioral change, time, infrastructure, cloud security, all of the above.”
“Digital therapeutics possess immense potential to offer healthcare at home and address pressing healthcare challenges.”
⏱️ Timestamp
01:27 - Introduction
06:32 - The importance of impact
09:53 - Singapore’s advantages as an ecosystem
21:36 - CURATE.AI, Optim.AI, and other AI technologies
29:39 - Digital therapeutics (DTx)
35:56 - Growing the local talent pipeline for the biotech industry
42:55 - Resources for those interested in biotech
🎙️ Transcript
Episode Preview
Prof. Dean Ho: We're at a stage now where probably one of the most pivotally important to dos for the field, not only here but worldwide, is clinical trial design innovation. When COVID happened, decentralizing trials was at the forefront, because patients couldn't get everywhere they needed to be. How we define decentralization, how we define clinical trial design innovation, needs to be discussed, trialed, and supported.
Joson Ng: Hi, thanks for joining us on Nucleate Singapore Pulse, Singapore's premier podcast on the biotech ecosystem. I'm your host, Joson Ng, an MD-PhD candidate at Duke-NUS Medical School.
Whether you're a student thinking about creating your own startup or an industry professional looking for diverse perspectives. This is the podcast for you. The show notes and transcripts for the episode can be found on nucleatesingapore.substack.com.
Today we have Prof. Dean Ho, who is the Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the National University of Singapore. He is also the Provost's Chair Professor, the Director of the N.1 Institute for Health, as well as the Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Prof. Ho.
Prof. Dean Ho: Thank you so much for having me.
Introduction
Joson Ng: Would you mind introducing yourself for our audience members as well?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes. So my name is Dean Ho. I am currently a Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine, also known as WisDM, Director of the N.1 Institute for Health, also known as N.1 and also a Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
And the work that I do alongside our amazing team is to ensure that we can validate first in kind digital medicine innovations to directly impact health and health care.
Joson Ng: So to start off the interview, your previous background was in the U.S. and right after finishing your Ph.D., you also taught in Illinois at Northwestern University for five years.
And during that time, you co-founded a startup, Biotic Laboratories. Was that something that you wanted to do even while you were in grad school?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes. When I finished my graduate degree, I started my career, at the time, as an assistant professor in both the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern in Evanston in Chicago, and it was a remarkable place to begin my career.
The first off, I had never moved in my life. Born and raised in L.A. and kind of relocating to Chicago was certainly a change for me, but, you know, I was still fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues that were amazingly supportive. I actually had friends that I grew up with in L.A. That were starting business school there.
So I will say that right off the bat, when I started my academic career, I was almost immediately immersed into disciplines very different than my own, right? You can imagine that day one of being an assistant professor and I'm hanging out with a ton of people from the business school, you know, and I think that being around very diverse communities, which spanned beyond business, Northwestern has a renowned journalism school, a renowned law school, so on and so forth, it really kind of opened the horizons of my own career roadmap to think about what does impact mean? What do I need to learn if there are skill sets I don't have to bridge innovation with real validation and deployment.
And so very early on, even though when you start your own lab out, there's a lot of things you got to get done. You got to set up the lab. You got to get the experiments going. It really allowed myself and the team that I had at that time to think downstream. And that ultimately led to this kind of first venture with Biotic, which again was an amazing learning experience.
Joson Ng: It comes across to me that there's a really strong culture in Northwestern for entrepreneurship, for innovation. How much of that culture, do you think, is defined by the people versus the infrastructure that's available?
Prof. Dean Ho: That's a great question. I think it's, it's important to have both, but I think that community, accessibility of the stakeholders is essential. Chicago is a big city. The U.S. is a big place, but I felt that, you know, Illinois, Chicago, and its commitment to biomedical innovation. And, you know, being in Evanston and the city, you've got the medical school at Northwestern in the city. You've got the main campus in Evanston, but you've got University of Illinois, Chicago. You've got the University of Chicago. You have the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is a distance away, but at the same time, the fabric is there. And the big thing is when we think about innovation, regardless of the discipline, right? But of course, let's use biomedical and healthcare as an example.
I think we often think about the ingredient for success to be, you know, engineers speaking to clinicians. We define translation as an engineer obtaining from a clinician, what the unmet medical need is, and that's important. Don't get me wrong. That's very important, but the roadmap to actual impact is winding. It is complex and it stretches way beyond unmet medical needs. I tell people that the graveyard of healthcare innovation is completely full of solutions that all address unmet medical needs, but that community of people there who can comment on policy, who can comment on identifying who the users are. Understanding that the user can be the patient, can be the caregiver, can be the doctor, can be the nurse, can be allied health, can be the pharmacist, or all of them. That whole community has to be there. And a place like Northwestern, much like NUS, has the pieces in place to make sure those who need to be talking to each other, to move beyond addressing an unmet medical need, and to really be thinking about everything all the way down to payer, all the way to insurance.
That tight community is essential.
The importance of impact
Joson Ng: I think that's great. Like, there are many players in any ecosystem, and having all of them really accessible can help foster that sense of innovation, entrepreneurship, and just sort of that environment in general. And more specifically, because you were part of the teaching faculty in Northwestern, what are your thoughts on defining patents, licenses, and spin offs as requirements or KPIs versus just letting it happen naturally for university faculty?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes. You know, this is important because decades ago, I think there was a very different tune being sung on the role of patenting and licensing and doing startups as a definition of impact, outcomes, success. And if you kind of think to where we are now, the walls of academia, I think the way that we can define impact is shifting.
If you look at WisDM, N.1, Biomedical Engineering, we're defining impact by the number of patients we're helping, by the number of trials that we are running, by the number of patients currently on trial from our various first in kind designs. And I think that alone is substantial progress, right? Because the papers we publish are largely defined by patients that we have helped.
And as well as the clinical community with whom we have collaborated at an unprecedented level, all the way to health economics, all the way to user engagement. We have wonderful team members that do that. And as we kind of think forward about impact. You know, I'd say that our, our studies have impacted hundreds of people.
All right. That's clear. We have recruitment numbers and the next frontier is how do we impact thousands? How do we impact tens of thousands or more, or the world? And this is where patenting, licensing, and spin offs serve as another avenue towards validation.
Because if you look at journal papers, yes, we know what peer review is. When conferences happen, we know that, a lot of them are really hard to get into. For those who are less familiar, you know, going through an IP filing roadmap, I mean, we're talking about office actions and timelines that stretch into the years with ultimate scrutiny. You know, I don't know if they have to be compulsory per se, but I think that they clearly represent novelty, contribution, due diligence, peer review, all of the above.
And I think it's important at this stage. You know, when we think about what defines success, what defines impact, what defines translation, it's an exciting time to help redefine that with the ultimate end user as a component of that. And I think all of these factors play a role.
Joson Ng: I like the way you phrase it as, you know, all these measures of patenting, licensing, as ways of looking at impact because that's really a central question in academia, like what kind of impact are we having? And for sure things like impact metrics and citation factors and all those are one side of the equation, but a great way to include more metrics about how this is changing the system as well or benefiting people is looking at, as you've pointed out, patients that have been supported or helped by clinical trials.
Singapore’s advantages as an ecosystem
Joson Ng: So when you moved to Singapore, was it in consideration of the biotech ecosystem here and the kind of support that is here in Singapore or what was it?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes. So many factors kind of catalyzed the move to Singapore. When I think of Singapore, I think of accessibility. I think of community. I think of the word catalysis. I think of an ecosystem that is committed to listening to the community that's ready to contribute and to support ideation, to support validation, to support deployment, to really develop user-centric solutions that can actually help Singapore. And then once that impact is validated to help the region and then to help the world, right?
Singapore is such an agile ecosystem and as I just mentioned, to really traverse this roadmap of any type of innovation. But again, let's focus on healthcare because there's so much more. There's sustainability, there's transportation, future of work. It really is so many factors, right? It's coming up with the ideas, it's running the experiments, it's thinking about the economics, it's thinking about the implementation all the way to policy, right? And Singapore is a place where that degree of accessibility, where if I e-mail a key stakeholder today, today is Thursday, I may very well be meeting with them tomorrow or Monday.
And what does that mean in real life? Because at the end of the day, academia has the capacity and is already doing this, is impacting patients directly, not 10 years later, it can be six months later, etc, etc. So when I talk about that accessibility, I'm talking about lives being saved, right?
And we've seen it happen at our institute. Long story short, a few years ago, a patient asked for help, and due to our actionable, dedicated, energetic team, a community of people actually hailing from different parts of the campus who had never worked together before, we actioned a study designed for a patient that had profoundly impactful outcomes to that patient and that was, you know, money will help, but time was working against us, right? And we got it done. And I owe that to the actionability of Singapore's ecosystem. And this is immensely important for academic innovation becoming reality, but also commercial innovation, because at the end of the day, it's for the patient, it's for their families, it's for the caregivers, it's for the clinician, right?
And it's for our students. To be able to educate them on the future today. And that's what's so exciting about this ecosystem here in Singapore.
Joson Ng: You mentioned that one of the common points you saw between Singapore and Northwestern was the idea of accessibility about how easy it is to take things to action as well here in Singapore.
What are some of the differences you find between Northwestern and Singapore? And even from where you grew up from LA, from the West Coast.
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes, I think both exciting when I say both, I mean, the West Coast and Chicago, both super exciting, both very vibrant. I think the big differentiator is alluding back to an important question you would ask about, is it the people? Is it the infrastructure?
You know, I think infrastructure matters and all three domains have infrastructure, right? There's no question about it, but I think Singapore takes that accessibility to new heights. And I think a big differentiator is this ability to make impact that in Singapore, that is technologically advanced at the leading edge with the ability to economically validate the innovation further, all the way to being able to prove out economic and behavioral adherence and sustainability, pushing all the way forward into payer policy and beyond. That's what we have here in Singapore. I think there is no other place in the world where we can empower that kind of progress at a timescale where we as a community can see that change before our very eyes. I'm going to add to that, which is what's so exciting about being part of the educational system here in Singapore, right?
When you think about the universities and you think about all of our partners, when we take these innovations forward, we see this kind of technological marvel materializing before our very eyes. But what's remarkable is that we get to have our student community there, right at the center of it all. And that's what creates this generation of innovators that speeds that full spectrum through that lens. And I think that's what's game changing in terms of being here in Singapore.
Joson Ng: Prof. Ho, you joined NUS in 2018, and since that time, aside from your duties in the university as a professor, you've also established KYAN Therapeutics, which we will go into in greater detail in later questions, but you've also essentially just set up a biotech company here as well.
How would you say is the difference in ease in setting up a biotech company in the U.S. with your work in Biotic versus setting up KYAN here in Singapore?
Prof. Dean Ho: When I talk about accessibility from an academic context, let's kind of transition that discussion into entrepreneurship and building companies, not just ours, but others.
You know, I have a background since years upon years ago, I have helped to vet startups for various funds, right? Venture arms of multi, multi, multi billion dollar companies to venture funds, so on and so forth. And so I kind of have that lens from both perspectives. What's really interesting and exciting about being here is, I think, every innovation entity, again, that can be in transportation, maritimes, food, sustainability, biotech, so on and so forth, has such an important role as part of our community and ecosystem because startup companies will develop tomorrow's medicines, startup companies will develop tomorrow's diagnostics, robotics, vehicles, so on and so forth, but these startups also serve as, first of all, training grounds for those who built the startup, potentially from their graduate work here in Singapore, and they are core employers and supporters of our university and other graduates moving forward.
And so the accountability and the responsibility of the startups here are critical, and we can kind of really see this living evolution of their roles every day we show up to work. And because the roles that I also have in terms of ensuring that our students are optimally prepared for the future, I know even further the impact and the importance of these startups and to support that. Right. It's, it's back to what I just talked about, right?
Getting capital is important, but having a clear roadmap for what the capital, the infrastructure, and again, that includes regulatory infrastructure, it includes test bed infrastructure, and that infrastructure includes regional abilities to expand that innovation for validation to probably one of the most vibrant regions in the world right now, there's nothing like it.
And Singapore is a beacon for the region. And I think a beacon for the world in terms of not just putting money in, not just, you know, buildings and housing these companies, it is a beacon for rapid and rigorous disciplined validation and deployment again, in a region where in and of itself is a living evolution. It's a living laboratory of the future of healthcare, not just by tech, but by economics, by insurance, by proving out actual value, right? And it's truly remarkable.
Joson Ng: It's really exciting to hear that Singapore for being such a small country is also punching above its weight in the global biotech scene.
Prof. Dean Ho: Absolutely. The agility is unprecedented and it's exemplary and it's amazing to be a part of it.
Joson Ng: Speaking on the idea of agility, what would you say are some of the major differences that have happened in the biotech sector since you came here in 2018?
Prof. Dean Ho: I think that in terms of recent times, certainly COVID happened.
Aside from talking about how the dynamics have changed into how healthcare is delivered, there's something that I think is, a real opportunity for especially things like digital health. Right. And, you know, we've been talking about innovation from a technological standpoint.
I think we're at a stage now where probably one of the most pivotally important to dos for the field, not only here, but worldwide is clinical trial design innovation. When COVID happened, decentralizing trials was at the forefront, because patients couldn't get everywhere they needed to be. How we define decentralization, how we define clinical trial design innovation needs to be discussed, trialed, and supported.
And I think what's exciting for us, right? And I'll use an example and we can talk about this more later is when we, you know, people I think have, have had us speak a lot about CURATE, right? And again, thanks to the amazing team we have and the patients and their families, we've shown that we can find the right doses at the right time.
But, while that's very important and we continue on that work, what CURATE has shown us is that we can rethink how we get a little bit more data from each patient to rethink trial design.
Patients are often randomized to get specific doses in clinical trials. And when they don't respond to certain doses, they're removed from the trial, but with platforms like CURATE, it's not just about finding that dose. It's about calibrating more patients, letting them see more doses, because under standard designs we'll never know if a patient could have responded better at another dose. CURATE eliminates that by calibrating everybody. And so clinical trial design innovation, tested, actioned, supported, funded, trailed, that's probably one of the most pressing matters.
Because back to your question of how has healthcare changed, we need to be able to find better ways to accelerate rigorously the validation of things like therapies, but we also need to find ways to optimize how we use those therapies, and trial design can be more than just validation. It can be validation and optimization combined. And Singapore is a perfect place to lead in that area.
CURATE.AI, Optim.AI, and AI technologies in general
Joson Ng: Actually, Prof Ho, on that thought, could you elaborate more on what was the thought process behind developing CURATE as well as the other AI tool that you use in KYAN, the Optim.AI?
Prof. Dean Ho: The reason we developed CURATE is because we all know patients are different from each other. It's as obvious as the beginning of time, but the thing that we have to realize is we are different from ourselves over time, right?
And so truly personalized medicine, at least to us, is dynamic. The best dose for a patient on a Monday may be very different for that very same patient the following Monday. And so personalization is dynamic.
Synergy. Right? And there's a lot of debate on synergy. How impactful is it? How do we look for it? How do we monitor it? Synergy is dynamic too. Synergy alone does not guarantee a good treatment outcome, right? And synergy can be dose dependent, time dependent, and patient specific. It's really important for us to ask that deeper question, and that's what Curate does. And then when we talk about CURATE, the natural next question we get is data.
Where do we get our data? This again is back to this whole concept of let's rethink the narrative and the terminology. CURATE.AI, I tell the community, is not big data driven. We don't take population based big data to train algorithms to treat the following individual that walks in the door and that's okay too.
There are many approaches that do this for diagnostics intervention, but, when we use CURATE, we use small data. And I would argue that when the patient walks in the door, we have no data. We don't use population approaches. We use only a patient's own data to manage only their own care, comma, dynamically, right?
So this is a different strategy of how we acquire the data because our data is acquired prospectively for each patient, which then lends people to the next question. Well, how do doctors trust CURATE if it's a black box? The thing is, it's not a black box. We have no data. The clinicians, the doctors, the nurses, the pharmacists, they are there at step one. They are themselves prospectively building the database that they themselves will use to treat the very same patient they calibrated. It is truly hand in hand, right? It's the same thing for things like Optim.AI right?
Optim.AI is not used for, say, the dosing components, used for looking at which drugs to put together. They can even offer some potential dosing insights, but which drugs should be combined in the first place? There's so many different ways to do this in the field right now. Optimize takes kind of a phenotypically driven, an outcomes driven approach to design those combination. And it does not use synergy modeling, doesn't use the same type of data, and again, it doesn't use population-based drug interaction data to derive combos, truly n of one.
And that's why we did it. You know, n of one has long been the goal of healthcare, we want to give patients the treatment that's tailored to them. How do we do so at scale? I think both of these approaches move us a big step forward in that direction.
Joson Ng: It really is the idea of personalized medicine, but I was just curious because you kind of touched on this a little bit, but what was your experience working on this together with clinicians?
Were they hesitant or did it only start out as hesitation? Then once they saw everything work and you know, they trusted the process. What was that like for you?
Prof. Dean Ho: That is such an important question because it was a decade plus journey, right? Let's start with standard care. In the practice of clinical oncology worldwide, the prevalent standard of care is dose change, dose modification is based on toxicity.
Makes sense. Patients typically see higher doses for treatment and the only time a dose would be clinically guided for modification would be when it's too toxic. Many, many years ago, through some early validation, we had this notion that sometimes less is more, right? Sometimes brute force isn't always best, and I would say 10 years ago, that was a very, to put it this way, a tough pill to swallow, right, for the clinical community.
And I get it. It's tough to scientifically, you know, figure out like, hey, how could you lower doses to get better outcomes? And we validated, we did studies in preclinical, certainly in vitro, then preclinical, and then the initial validation of CURATE was in transplant because titration happens anyways.
And that led us to our first case reports of using this for clinical oncology. And when you flash forward a decade, we had patients approaching us for clinical decision support, who themselves are clinicians. To put this in a more official context, in 2022, Dr. Agata Blasiak from our team, presented some of our initial work alongside Dr. Raghav Sundar and an amazing team at NUH, NUHS, NUS Medicine, prospectively calibrating a cohort of solid cancer patients with CURATE. And they presented this at the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2022, as we know, is kind of the world's preeminent conference for clinical oncology, which I felt was a milestone for NUS College of Design and Engineering, because we're talking about an engineering based platform moving into humans. Right, moving into human on the other side of campus and again, as I mentioned, the trainees involved have are at the leading edge now of first in kind trial design, but also validation.
And then to sum up this thought, 2023 this past summer at ASCO, same meeting, American Society of Clinical Oncology 2023 Annual Meeting. I was at the podium in an educational session with hundreds of preeminent, leading clinical oncologists talking about the CURATE.AI workflow. I think that's a proud moment for the AI community, it's a proud moment for the digital medicine community, and importantly, it's a proud moment for NUS.
Because it was, to our knowledge, one of the rare opportunities for our community to not only present at the podium of a first in kind interventional innovation, but we led a chapter alongside clinicians from all over the world in the ASCO educational book, which is a cornerstone educational resource to publish the CURATE.AI workflow.
And I will conclude with the fact that a few weeks after that podium presentation, we were contacted by international regulators to provide our insights into doing what we do from Singapore as a resource for the world, as insights for the world, as actionability for the world. And I think that in addition to, of course, publishing, in addition to, of course, helping the patients that participated in our trial. It gave us a clear path towards impacting policy on a global scale, powered by our community here in Singapore. That's ultimate impact.
Joson Ng: I think that's super exciting to think about something that was grown from here in Singapore, impacting how policies are and regulation is in other different countries. Certainly a very exciting development, especially in clinical oncology as well.
Digital therapeutics (DTx)
Joson Ng: I wanted to look at what happened during COVID because it was a pandemic and a lot of things were shut down, but at the same time it presented a lot of opportunities. What kind of opportunities did you see for AI during the COVID pandemic? How did that work for CURATE?
Prof. Dean Ho: I think one of the most important things was decentralizing intervention as well as diagnostics and monitoring. And I think that that leads me to the digital therapeutics. Digital therapeutics, or DTX, I think is an emerging and in many respects, cemented and validated form of intervention.
For those who are unfamiliar, digital therapeutics or DTX is software as treatment. And again, an amazing team, Dr. Alex Remus and Dr. Marlena from our team and many others, leading efforts to validate this multitasking tool that had been developed and with Professor Chris Asplund as an example and Professor Jason Lee, we kind of ramped up these trials during COVID. And with the deepest gratitude to our funders, the scenario of how to validate became an experiment for us. And we ended up decentralizing the studies, to the fullest extent that we could, because we wanted to complete these trials.
And so what is digital therapeutics? In our case, we have this multitasking tool where you can imagine it's like different tasks and it's on a tablet or it's on a phone or it's on a computer, and instead of kind of these fixed intensity trainings that we do, we incorporated CURATE into the platform. So that it could, on the back end, dynamically change difficulty, not dose. Analogous to dosing, but difficulty for us to construct these digital avatars that let us not just monitor the performance of the user remotely, right? Cause you can check, you can track scoring. You can say they're getting better. They're getting worse. That's a diagnostic, but we were using this to try to optimize cognitive performance and in the coming months, you know, we're going to report the outcomes. But let's say, let's just say it was promising, right?
Very, very promising. And this is a multi cohort study done in a decentralized manner. So, in one fell swoop, we've got different trial design, decentralization, digital therapeutics, integrated with CURATE.AI, like happening robustly, rigorously, etc. But what this showed us was, you know, there is a path forward for DTX. However, I will add that none of this is possible without, especially during COVID and continuing on to this day, a remarkable user engagement team that we have at our institutes.
And the reason for that is because digital therapeutics is not the same as popping a pill, right? Typically we pop a pill, we move on with our day. Digital therapy requires considerations of adherence, behavioral change, time, infrastructure, cloud security, all of the above. And so we still have work to do, but digital therapy, especially for ecosystems like Singapore and our neighboring regions, possess immense potential to offer health care at home, not just remote diagnostics, but remote intervention to address a lot of the most pressing matters of our community, healthy aging, aged societies, so on and so forth.
Joson Ng: You co-authored a book Medicine Without Meds: Transforming Patient Care with Digital Therapeutics where you analyze some leading digital therapeutics organizations and companies and you illuminated some of the best practices in product development, issues that need to consider when starting up and pitfalls as well for them to avoid. Can you tell us more about this book and what was the impetus behind it?
Prof. Dean Ho: You know, we're so excited for this book. It was a privilege to work with Yoann Sapanel and Dr. Agata Blasiak from the Institute for Digital Medicine on this work. This book was quite a journey, right? It's being published by Hopkins Press, one of the longest running, continuously running academic publishing houses in the U.S. I mean, I think it was a validation of the need for a book like this, and I'll add that it is not an academic textbook. It's not a standard approach where we're kind of summarizing different journal paper outcomes, but it's a blueprint. It is a blueprint for how to bridge ideation with validation all the way towards charting out a path towards economic sustainability with digital therapeutics as the use case.
So really it's a blueprint. And in addition to the amazing privilege of working with the team on this. There are important insights from our community, venture community, policy community, patient community on considerations that need to be addressed, such as user engagement, right, making sure solutions are being designed in a way that the users will use the solution and keep using the solution.
Again that's kind of the opportunity and also the challenge with DTX, which is making sure that while a patient may not need a pill to improve certain outcomes, they're gonna have to stick with it to keep it up. And so, when we think about cognitive training, to keep up that level of cognitive performance, to address potentially looking at things like multitasking ability, to keep up that level of outcome, engagement matters.
And something we're very proud of with this book is that we established the WisDM Patient Impact Fund in alignment with this book and all of the author royalties will be put back into this fund and we're going to use it to help cover the cost of care for patients in Singapore who need some extra help covering their medical care.
So we're excited about that. It launches October 17th of this year, so time's flying, and worldwide.
Joson Ng: I really hope it proves as a very important and helpful resource for anyone who is thinking of going to digital therapeutics or anyone who wants a better understanding of the field.
Growing the local talent pipeline for the biotech industry
Joson Ng: Zooming out and looking at the whole ecosystem of Singapore, there was a recent white paper that SGInnovate and LEK Consulting highlighted in terms of a need for a human talent pipeline to support the growing biotech industry. Prof, as a professor in NUS, you regularly come to contact with very engaged students. What's your on-the-ground sensing of interest in biotech by engineers or scientists in NUS?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes, you know, in addition to directing institutes, I'm also the Head of Department of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering at NUS. And that allows me a different privilege of working with our student community, and it's a community unlike any other.
I don't think there's another educational ecosystem in the world. Where our students have an opportunity to be at the very forefront of creating new technologies, validating them, and potentially even continuing to bring these technologies forward as a part of our ecosystem.
I'll give an example. Not long ago, when I first arrived here, we had a very bright student, Anh Truong, who was doing final year project and she was looking at kind of retrospective data optimization on how to use CURATE. It was really kind of a training ground for using CURATE. And then eventually on, after graduation, joined up with our team, at the Institute and became a researcher in the Institute.
And, you know, thanks to our kind of collective, right, our N.1 WisDM BME team that was working in the Institute, she played a role in validating prospectively a lot of this innovation to help guide and optimize patient care dynamically. If you look at that evolution, it's learning how to use platforms and improve platforms as a student with direct transition into validation interventionally at the frontline alongside our clinical community using first in kind technologies.
And to carry things even further, to have the experience of working alongside user engagement, and the users include patients, families, caregivers, doctors, nurses and beyond, and then to have access to those in health economics. There is no other place in the world where our students can see this degree of full roadmap, and it's our intent to further bolster that.
And how do we do it? I've talked about different disciplines. I've talked about user engagement, implementation, sciences, but now we're branched to communications and new media operations research, right? Policy research. We have, I think, the only place in the world where we can push the envelope and be at the very leading edge of a completely reimagined interdisciplinarity.
What's going to happen at the end is we're going to create, you know, this student community, and we're already doing this, right, that sees the whole matrix. When you think about College of Design and Engineering, right, the diversity of disciplines involved, we can change the world. We're already doing it and changing the world needs that spectrum of biomedical engineers working with industrial design, working with built environment, working with architecture, working with electrical engineering, and then branching out into the social sciences, and then to have policymaking and regulatory, a phone call away.
There's nowhere else in the world we can make this happen and this creates a completely amazing new generation of students.
Joson Ng: I think it's great. It heartens me a lot that I'm part of that ecosystem where there's a lot of effort to impart these kind of skills to students, even while we're still in university.
On that note, can you share more about what are these initiatives and courses that a lot of students can take if they're interested in entrepreneurship or innovation in NUS?
Prof. Dean Ho: Sure. You know, I'll give some examples. Dr. Bina Rai, biomedical engineering, who has expertise in serious gaming, has really been pioneering work with our division of industrial design to develop co-creation workshops as part of coursework to innovate solutions, serious games based solutions and other solutions to help our community. And again, this is our, this is the action before our eyes to be able to co create with the user solutions that they will use, and then to see that validation.
At NUS Biomedical Engineering, we, with an amazing team pioneered a platform called, " BME for Good" or "bGood". And as part of co-creation there, we're going beyond prototyping. Students are working with the community to understand challenges confronting those with disabilities, or those who need rehabilitation from physical ailment. And to come up with solutions, but then to move beyond prototyping to go into manufacturing so that we can actually help at scale.
And more recently, we've started to branch into the region with a platform called bGlobal, which allows us to harness our creativity to help our neighbors. And for students to be able to be part of this, first and foremost, they have a chance to understand the user. When we understand the user, we understand what it will take to drive behavioral change. We understand what it'll take to drive adherence. And those are some of the core hallmarks of robust entrepreneurship, right? And when we're talking about manufacturing built into this, the economics of it matters. These are kind of the hallmarks that we want to build in as pillars of next generation education with validation right before their very eyes.
Super excited.
Joson Ng: It sounds like now is a really great time to be a student in NUS Biomedical Engineering. I totally missed out on that opportunity.
Prof. Dean Ho: It's an exciting time to be a colleague. You know, it's a privilege for me. I want to add that. You know, I've been at NUS now for just about five years, and it has been an amazing, amazing journey and, a true privilege working with everybody.
The interconnection, the dedication to helping the community is truly heartening, it's moving, and it leads to outcomes. And I'm just excited to, for us as a community in Singapore to showcase this to the world.
Resources for those interested in biotech
Joson Ng: On that note, Professor Ho, for students in general or young people in general, what are the things that people can engage in or dive in if they find themselves really thinking about a career in biotech, either in academia or in the private industry?
Prof. Dean Ho: Yes, for those interested in biotech, of course, right? There's so many resources online to learn about where the field's focused. I'll give a simple example. There's a lot of websites like STAT news or Endpoints that really highlight kind of where the focus is, which indications, which therapies, what in the field of AI, diagnostics is happening.
But for those who are interested today in biotech, I would take it a step further or a few steps further beyond insights into the technical innovations of biotech, which is the core, right? I think that's the important part to start. There's a lot of other resources analyzing the markets, analyzing healthcare systems means, looking at what are going to be some of the most prevalent challenges of our time confronting societies when we think about aging. Because when we think about the users, when we think about trajectory of the market, when we think about, you know, regional need, that will help us frame much like when I started back to the beginning, my days at Northwestern framing, what is it that I need to think about if I want to be in this space?
We've already established that the technical component is there it's biotech, right there. We want to come up with cool devices and AI and in therapeutics, but actual adoption requires so much more right and for those especially here in Singapore There's so many other factors that come into play, but all of them are accessible.
I've worked with the business school I've worked with social sciences. We've worked with sustainability community members. We've worked with community organizations, many factors come into play when thinking about biotech as a whole of system, and I'd encourage anybody interested to really diversify their understanding of what it takes to go from A to Z in this field. It'll help them a lot moving forward.
Joson Ng: Thank you for that, Prof Ho. To wrap up the interview, what are your predictions for the development of Singapore's biotech ecosystem? And what are you most personally excited about in terms of that development?
Prof. Dean Ho: You know, there is no limit, there is no limit for what we can do here. I see it every day. And when I think about kind of the next phases of innovation, Singapore is already a beacon for healthcare innovation. We know that in terms of investment, in terms of startups, Singapore's healthcare system is a beacon for the world.
The innovation is amazing, but so is the healthcare system. And that is important. Right, because that's a very downstream reflection of why we are innovating. We have a very clear picture in front of us of the actual ecosystem our innovations aim to exist within, right?
And so given that, given the opportunities afforded to the students, given the amazing policy infrastructure, given the amazing learning ethos. When I say learning ethos, that's everybody in our ecosystem. Everybody is willing to engage and learn with each other, as a fabric. There is no limit to what we can achieve.
And you couple that with this region of the world, right? And our opportunity to truly validate at country scale. How innovation can push down on increasing cost of health care. How we can educate our future leaders in this space through this type of validation. I'm so excited. I'm so, so excited because now we are the beacon.
Joson Ng: Thank you so much for that, Prof. Ho.
Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. And thank you for the insightful discussion as well.
Prof. Dean Ho: Thank you so much for having me.
Joson Ng: Stay tuned for monthly podcasts with key stakeholders of the biotech ecosystem, including founders, investors, and policymakers. If you have suggestions for the podcast or who you'd like to hear from, feel free to send me an email in the episode description.
Join the Singapore Life Sciences Community Slack channel powered by Nucleate Singapore, where we are building an open community to enable conversations in the life science ecosystem of Singapore.
📚 Further readings
 | A guest post by
|