Over the past few years, the dig­i­tal health space has been rapid­ly ex­pand­ing and draw­ing the at­ten­tion of Big Phar­ma. Now, one com­pa­ny has grabbed Sanofi’s at­ten­tion — and sealed a deal.

New-York based Dar­i­o­Health an­nounced it en­tered in­to a strate­gic al­liance agree­ment with Sanofi’s US sub­sidiary in a mul­ti-year, $30 mil­lion deal. The agree­ment will push Dario’s “dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics” mar­ket ex­pan­sion and com­mer­cial adop­tion, the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment.

This is just the most re­cent de­vel­op­ment in the dig­i­tal health space. Dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics com­pa­nies like Ak­ili with its pre­scrip­tion video game and Ada Health — build­ing a di­ag­nos­tics app and rais­ing $30 mil­lion a few weeks ago — have al­ready start­ed to make their foot­print on the space.

In short, Dario’s AI-based plat­form is pri­mar­i­ly a high­ly per­son­al­ized health man­age­ment sys­tem — ty­ing cus­tom de­vices such as a glu­cose mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem, blood pres­sure cuff and weight scale to Dario’s mo­bile app — which users with di­a­betes, hy­per­ten­sion and oth­er ail­ments can use to man­age their con­di­tions. And ad­di­tion­al ex­pan­sion is on­go­ing, with the com­pa­ny go­ing in­to mus­cu­loskele­tal pain and be­hav­ioral health af­ter it ac­quired two small­er com­pa­nies.

Rick An­der­son

As Dar­i­o­Health pres­i­dent Rick An­der­son told End­points News, part of the plat­form is to learn user’s rou­tines — “would un­der­stand when to com­mu­ni­cate to them, what they re­spond­ed to, what they didn’t re­spond to, and the abil­i­ty to ad­just that com­mu­ni­ca­tion over a pe­ri­od of time.” And on top of an AI en­gine that runs the plat­form, Dar­i­o­Health has been build­ing so­lu­tions and ap­pli­ca­tions and cross-in­te­grat­ing them in­to one app.

Ac­cord­ing to An­der­son, that cross-in­te­gra­tion al­lows for a “uni­fied user ex­pe­ri­ence.” And while the com­pa­ny orig­i­nal­ly went to con­sumers first when they got their start in 2011, Dar­i­o­Health now is look­ing to bring health plans and pay­ers in­to the mix.

Sanofi orig­i­nal­ly reached out to Dario, An­der­son said — and they have been build­ing the re­la­tion­ship for the last 9-10 months. The deal is a mix be­tween mar­ket­ing and co-de­vel­op­ment: Sanofi will help pro­mote Dar­i­o­Health’s so­lu­tions, and every­thing that gets de­vel­oped as part of the sev­er­al-year agree­ment will be com­mer­cial­ized on Dario’s plat­form.

Sanofi is train­ing their mar­ket ac­cess teams around Dario’s plat­form, ac­cord­ing to An­der­son — and with the fo­cus on health plans, the Sanofi deal gives them greater reach in­to that space.

Even­tu­al­ly, there may be an op­tion to link Sanofi’s drugs in­to the app, ac­cord­ing to An­der­son — but that is not part of to­day’s an­nounced agree­ment.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”