Over the coming few years, we anticipate a leap forward in our understanding of the impact that genetics, proteomics, and other omics sciences have upon our health. Understanding of our molecular makeup is also accelerating, and this is likely to lead to our being able to predict and prevent disease pathways and manifestations with much greater precision.‍

Can you share the story behind your company, and what motivated you to enter the AI/digital health space?

The founders of Origen Genetics have a combined 20 years of experience in health technology projects, including in Spain, where we are based. For example, one of the founders previously worked on the digitization of Spain’s public healthcare system, something which was a great success but which also contributed to a decrease indirect interactions between doctors and patients. Our founders’ awareness of this shift led them to appreciate the potential of AI to partially reverse this trend by using technology to facilitate patient-doctor conversations. They had also become concerned about the lack of transparency which they had witnessed around genetic testing. In particular, they were aware that genetic test reports could be extremely challenging for patients to understand.

Our founders realised that both of these concerns about technology and healthcare could be addressed if the delivery of precision/personalised medicine were to be accelerated. Four years ago, they decided to address this unmet need by founding Origen Genetics, a company that focuses on the development of precision medicine technology.

What makes your technology or solution unique compared to other offerings in the market?

We have taken a twofold approach to realising our commitment to making genetic information easily accessible to and routinely used by both patients and doctors. We have created a product which provides online genetic advice to patients. We have also created a personalised medicine platform that helps physicians use genomic information in their daily clinical practice and that can also be used by healthcare managers to facilitate decisions based on professional predictive models. Patients are also able to access this platform in a way that gives them control over their own clinical information and keeps them informed — even after their own genetic testing has been completed — about any updates or new scientific developments that could be relevant to their ethnicity, gender, age, and other variables.

How do you ensure your company remains innovative and ahead of the competition in such a rapidly evolving field?

We are a passionate team and consider ourselves to be technology and healthcare geeks. We are committed to continuous learning, and we attend and sponsor key technology events in Spain. We regularly collaborate with some of the most important research centres in Spain on healthtech projects funded by the EU and provide services to the main innovation centres in Spain.

What are the most significant technology trends you see shaping the industry over the next few years?

There is no doubt that omics and AI are ushering in a new era in healthcare. Over the coming few years, we anticipate a leap forward in our understanding of the impact that genetics, proteomics, and other omics sciences have upon our health. Understanding of our molecular makeup is also accelerating, and this is likely to lead to our being able to predict and prevent disease pathways and manifestations with much greater precision. In 10 years’ time, we expect to see patients routinely accessing individualised healthcare plans which include fully personalised medicines together with advice on nutrition, lifestyle, and even cosmetic choices.

In order for this vision to be realised, healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients alike will need access to high-tech tools that enable them to “convert” genetic knowledge into effective clinical decisions. AI will be the key to this, as it will allow for increased specialisation around diagnosing and predicting disease and risk patterns. This will, in turn, facilitate HCPs becoming deeply specialized. It will also enable patients to take a more active role in their own care. In the near future, we anticipate that AI will evolve into digital assistants that are able to provide individuals with personalised health advice, and that these AI-based digital assistants will also be able to produce tailored medicines, cosmetics, food, clothing, and other personalised services.

What changes/improvements would you like to see in the regulatory space to support the growth/sustainability of the industry?

One of the major challenges arising from this new era of personalised medicine is that it will require the collection of a significant amount of information about individuals, including sensitive healthcare information. It is, of course, imperative that this information be safeguarded and protected. We need to be urgently addressing questions around how we can balance the need to share health information with the right to privacy and how we can provide personalized products without the user losing control over their own personal data. There is also uncertainty about whether our technology has the capacity to create intelligent systems that understand the risks to an individual’s health and are able to take clinically robust decisions on the acceptability of risk and the prioritisation of treatments. There is really one burning question underlying all of these: Can we have enough faith in AI and certainty in its reliability to trust it with our lives?

Certainly, we should not proceed with blind trust in AI systems. Indeed, we are not doing so. Across the world and in the EU, legislative steps are currently underway to regulate the way in which AI interacts with health data. However, allowing AI to make decisions about our health is something that goes beyond procedures and regulations to raise deep and overarching questions of ethics. We anticipate such ethical questions will be discussed in great detail over the coming decade.

What do you believe investors prioritize the most when evaluating an asset/opportunity in this sector, and how does your company align with these priorities?

The most important factor for an investor — aside from the strength of a target’s team and the viability of its product — is the level of certainty about the likelihood of its product being a success. Investors will want to gauge the evidence which a target has gathered to demonstrate that its customers, or potential customers, trust and are willing to pay for its product.

The bedrock for doing so is to comprehensively demonstrate to investors that the product has the relevant certifications and approvals demonstrating its reliability and safety. But potential investors will also want to see evidence of wider market research conducted to show that there are a significant number of customers with an unresolved (or unknown) problem which the product addresses and who are willing and able to pay for it.

Origen produces personalised medicine products, and this means that in order to secure funding rounds, we needed to convince our investors about the validity of our research into wider market questions, such as how genetic information affect your health and how professionals might use enhanced availability of genetic information to improve their decision making. For example, at a micro level, we demonstrated that knowledge of the way in which a patient’s genetic makeup predisposes them to metabolise a drug can enable it to be prescribed more accurately. At a macro level, we convinced our investors that the availability of reliable, rigorously verified genetic information for use in daily clinical practice has the potential to create a sea of change in the delivery of healthcare.