'We need to do better job of defining patient-centricity' - Virgil Simons, founder The Prostate Net

For Virgil Simons, the patient is central to everything in drug development, which is hardly surprising for the founder and president of The Prostate Net and Prostate Net Europa - a 'non-profit patient education and advocacy organization dedicated to prostate cancer victims and their caregivers'.

Speaking at Partnerships in Clinical Trials Europe 2016, he explains that at the most basic level, the industry as a whole needs to do a 'better job of defining patient-centricity'. Through his work, Simons attempts to get the pharma industry to 'understand the role of patient-centricity from initial drug development, to clinical trial recruitment initiation, to downstream care. The problem is we talk a lot about it, but we don't really know how to do it.'

For many, technology is intrinsically connected to how patient-centricity is going to develop, but whilst Simons sees it certainly playing a key role in the future, there are limitations right now. He points out that there are currently over 1400 apps for prostate cancer alone, but he cannot 'really identify what benefit is being provided to the patient'.

However, he sees the real benefit that mHealth will bring is the huge amount of data it will generate, which Simons believes will drive precision, personalized medicine 'that will have the biggest impact on drug development, patient treatment and overall quality of life.'

Watch the full interview, where Simons also explores the biggest changes he expects in 2017, below or here.