Second Keynote To Emphasize Digital Medicine Opportunities

Nik Leist, senior director of ingestible sensor manufacturing and site leader, Proteus Digital Health, will present a keynote address on the second day of the CPhI North America Conference. Currently, Mr. Leist leads the teams responsible for the end-to-end manufacturing operations for Proteus’ novel ingestible sensor technology. His keynote session, “Integrating Silicon with Drugs: Pushing the Boundaries of Pharma Manufacturing with Digital Medicines,” underscores the core theme of innovation that runs through this year’s CPhI conference program, and will take place on Wednesday, April 25 from 1:15pm – 2:00pm.

During his keynote session, Mr. Leist will explore how the convergence of digital technologies and healthcare is fundamentally changing the way patients interact with their own health. With greater access to mobile applications and wearable devices, they are actively engaging with their medications in ways never seen before. Digital medicines, developed over the last 16 years, and in real-world use in the last 2.5 years, is a driver of this change. Mr. Leist will outline the steps required, including customizing machinery and partnering with global pharmaceutical companies, to develop DigiMeds. This new category of pharmaceuticals, pairing medications with sensors, opens the door for more informed decisions and conversations across the healthcare field and enables a true integration of technology directly into medications.

“We are at a very exciting point in the evolution of digital medicines, now pushing the boundaries of digital health to facilitate individualized care, providing highly accurate diagnoses, and answering two of the most basic questions in healthcare: did the patient take their medication, and did the medication work?,” said Mr. Leist. “The fact that people are starting to embrace technology to improve their health outcomes will help shift the focus onto the prevention of diseases and adverse health conditions rather than solely on curing them. I’m very much looking forward to presenting our work and to connect with my peers at CPhI North America.”

“Between Nik Leist and our other conference keynote speaker, Dr. Bertalan Mesko, we have two progressive thinkers whose work focuses on moving the narrative around the convergence of real-time high-speed communications, technology and life sciences forwards in a meaningful way,” said Joseph Marks, brand director, CPhI North America. “The pace of development is only set to increase and the better positioned, in terms of understanding and embracing the developing generation of devices, apps and interpretative platforms, that the pharmaceutical and biopharma industries are, the more agile they can be to embrace and leverage technology to optimize the opportunities to engage the market on a highly personal level.”