Kelly Price Discusses PDTs Gaining Popularity

Kelly Price, US head of rare disease at HRA Pharma, talks about the shifting preference for nonpharmacologic treatments, such as prescription digital therapeutics (PDTs).

Transcript

What are some PDTs that launched or gained popularity in 2022 that you hope to see further implemented in 2023?

There's definitely a bias here. I'm the former VP [vice president] of market access with Mahana. I know that PDT very well; I think there's no question that the clinical trials and the data are strong against standard of care, which is a therapist-led intervention. I hope there's strong traction with that product in particular because [patients with] IBS [irritable bowel syndrome], most of them are 40-year-old women—definitely my cohort of people—and they're looking for nonpharmacological interventions, and this is it. It's really the only one besides a pretty restrictive low-FODMAP [fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols] diet, which can be difficult.

I think that we are definitely in the midst of a crisis in 2 ways. We always talk about the opioid crisis, but we're also in a stimulant crisis. We see the overprescription of stimulants pretty significantly here, and so nonpharmacologic intervention in ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] could really be beneficial for some families and for children.

Do you think the ongoing Adderall shortage may contribute to a preference for nonpharmacologic treatments among children with ADHD?

Yeah, and I'm a mother. I have 2 children that struggle with ADHD, and as they grew through each sort of inflection period, there were times when they didn't want to take medication either.

Having something that's really noninvasive, as we like to say, could be really important for some families and for some children who don't want to be [on medication]. When you come off the medication and you're going down, you can be irritable. And when you're already going through high school or puberty and you're irritable as a baseline, you add on top of that. So I think there's a lot of use cases why a lot of patients would gravitate toward a nonpharmacological intervention.