June 5, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SILICON VALLEY -- A former Genentech and Facebook executive launched the digital-based startup Lyra Health to focus on helping people with mental illness and substance abuse problems, Silicon Beat reported Thursday night.
David Ebersman, the former chief financial officer at Facebook and Genentech, said the startup Lyra has the goal of transforming behavioral health care using technology. Lyra will use “analytics technology to identify people at risk of substance abuse or mental illness; software to match patients with the right providers and treatments; big data to assess treatment outcomes and understand what works; and software on the provider end to help doctors and therapists diagnose patients,” Silicon Beat noted.
“The vast majority of patients are undiagnosed, untreated or treated with ineffective therapies,” Ebersman said in a written statement.
There are about 50 million people in the United States who suffer from some form of behavioral health issues, including drug or alcohol dependency, schizophrenia or post traumatic stress disorder.
Ebersman left Facebook in 2014, saying he wanted to focus on health care. He chose to focus on behavioral disorders as an area ripe for possibilities since it often resulted in high costs for companies and individuals, recode.net reported.
“The system that we have is terrible, works poorly and is frustrating to use; people who are sick suffer and there is a significant economic and productivity cost,” Ebersman told recode. “And, surprisingly, not much tech has been brought to bear to this problem that is a lonely and exhausting experience.”
In an interview with MedCity News, Ebersman said the mental health provision in the Affordable Care Act and technological innovations have made it an opportune time to launch the service he envisions. He said there are inefficiencies in diagnoses that need to be addressed. In the interview, Ebersman said the average time between diagnosis and treatment of depression is three years and 11 years for anxiety.
Lyra provides digital diagnostics tests for primary care providers. A customer care center works with patients to guide them through the care process and match them with optimal providers and treatments and a tracking tool follows the patients through their treatment and measures treatment outcomes and informs primary care physicians and psychiatrists if the current treatments are working, MedCity reported.
While some physicians may balk at digitizing mental health records, there is a big movement in the medical industry to resort to cloud-based data files to pride greater personalized medical advice. Companies such as Google Inc. and Amazon have developed cloud-based programs for the medical industry.
Many of the staff at Lyra have been personally affected by behavioral disorders, recode noted. Lyra Health will be based in Silicon Valley. Its launch was backed by an undisclosed amount of seed money from Venrock.
When Will Pfizer’s Breakup Happen?
Speculation that the revamping of Pfizer Inc. ’s internal business structure could happen as soon as this year has biotech wondering just when this Big Pharma company could see changes.
Last week an analyst with J.P. Morgan said he thinks there will be a much faster timeline than most of Wall Street had predicted for Pfizer’s stated mission to refocus its efforts on new medicines.
Pfizer initially announced in 2012 that it would be shedding units that were non-essential to that goal. It then promptly sold its nutrition silo to Nestle for $11.85 billion, which was rapidly accompanied by a public spin-off of its animal health business for $2.2 billion.
“While a Pfizer break-up would likely be a 2017 event, we see potential catalysts in 2015-2016,” said Chris Schott, an analyst at J.P. Morgan. “Three years of audited financial statements (2014-2016) are required before any part of Pfizer can be spun off, and we also see 2017 as an attractive time for action as investors see Pfizer’s innovative pipeline clearly contributing to growth and the established business having transitioned to a more stable profile.”
BioSpace wants to know what you think: Will Pfizer be a changed company by the end of 2015?
