(2018-04-25) Pear Therapeutics Talk

Corey McCann of Pear Therapeutics speaking at Matter accelerator. https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreymccann/

Last September they were first app to get FDA approval for treating Substance Abuse. https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm576087.htm

Last week Novartis/Sandoz announced partnership, so they'll be "detailing" (flogging to docs).

Corey was introduced to space at NeuroGaming conference run by Zack Lynch.

• realized needed to follow the Pharma model for scaling and getting paid.
  • alternatives (consumer self-pay, self-insured employers pay) are hard to grow, and hard to protect (moat)
  • protection also comes via patent

how do you get there?

• start with financial model: scale/margin necessary to fit Pharma model/culture.
• had 1500 ideas for digital therapeutics (cf CoachBot)
• what will it take to get regulatory approval?
• prioritize on ability to generate quality data to build evidence
• they acquired multiple companies to build asset? (maybe not, this was unclear)

They thought user engagement would be key.

• but game-oriented devs driven crazy by code process necessary for FDA.
• FinTech and EMR devs a better fit

Plan for portfolio of products: target 5 approved in next 5 years.

FDA

• they want to solve the problem, and no drugs in the pipeline are going to solve it
• go talk when you have the hard data

Coming products (moving from discovery to development)

• schizophrenia
• multiple sclerosis
• not going to do Smoking Cessation because severity of downside (in the observable short-term) isn't big enough to justify the regulatory cost