Mango Sciences: Creating equitable access to healthcare

admin
By admin
6 Min Read

Mango Sciences: Creating equitable access to healthcare

Mohit is a physician, trained health economist, ex-strategy consultant, an early senior team member at Aetion, and most recently an investor, who has extensive global experience across the healthcare landscape with specific expertise at the intersection of data, technology and healthcare. He is the co-founder and CEO of Mango Sciences, a company dedicated to building a more representative and equitable healthcare system that improves patient access and powers global health innovation. In an interview he speaks on an array of topics. Excerpts:

Conception of Mango Sciences

Mohit maintains that inequity of access to cancer care across the globe is the primary reason for founding Mango Sciences.  “Just because you live in the emerging markets, why should you not be able to access the latest innovation from the pharmaceutical industry? There are 19M new cancer cases a year globally, of which 12M occur in the emerging markets.  Many of these patients pay out of pocket for their cancer care.”

The standard of care for later and even earlier stage cancers have become targeted immunotherapies, according to this health specialist. “However, because of global pharmaceutical pricing, these treatments cost $30K USD on average, which is beyond the reach of most people.”  The market is failing, and most patients are unable to access the latest innovations.  Mango Sciences solves this problem by creating a platform across the ecosystem of providers, lenders and global pharma to enable novel financing (BNPL) for individual patients based on treatment value they achieve.

Digitization within healthcare

Digitisation of healthcare will attain greater significance and improve the experience of patients. Mohit suggests that digital transformation should start with specific use cases where everyone benefits – managers, clinicians and patients. “Incremental gains across the organization will win over key stakeholders who may have gone through the previous pain of EHR installations.  Finally, embedding digital in new workflows to improve the day to day lives of clinicians will always be met in a positive frame of mind.”

Creating an equitable healthcare system

“Our core mission is to improve equitable access to cancer care across the globe.  We believe patients should not be in financial hardship to access the best and latest treatments.” Noting that even in the US, many patients have high co-pays for their cancer drugs and end up in financial difficulty, Mohit notes that one needs to understand global treatment patterns, unmet need and real-world outcomes is core to our business.  “We use these insights with pharma partners to create novel financing opportunities for patients to access their latest treatments.”

The Querent platform

Mango Sciences take large volumes of structured and unstructured data from hospitals and create standardized unified data models.  Currently focused on clinical cancer data, the firm uses advanced natural language processing to code all the doctors’ written notes, along with diagnostic and lab data to enable this. “We are focused on collecting data from emerging markets as most clinical trial data is from Caucasian populations. We use this data to understand a) real world outcomes, unmet need, treatment patterns and b) using knowledge graphs and patient similarity analyses, we are able to predict how a specific drug will work for a specific patient. Fundamentally, our aim is to get to the right drug to the right patient at the right time.”

Leadership traits

“My job is to continually educate myself on topics in and outside of health.  With my team, my moto, hire the best people and let them flourish.  At any start-up, we are solving problems every day.  As a team, we are focused on supporting each other, whilst enabling everyone to continually develop themselves.”

The Success mantra

Patience with persistence and understanding the money flow, according to this entrepreneur are the most traits of running a successful venture. “With any innovation, understanding who the financial winners and losers will be is vital…then focusing the story on the benefit to patients.  Of course, it is a win-win if patients benefit, and organisations’ bottom lines also improve.”

Healthcare industry – the way forward

Much innovation in healthcare is focused on the developed European or North American healthcare systems.  I see the opportunity to leapfrog and innovate in the emerging markets and create health or wellness systems with technology and data at the core.   There is a large growing consuming middle-class population across APAC, MENA and LATAM who are looking to improve their access and experience of top- quality healthcare.  Innovating in a lower spend environment can create solutions for everyone across the globe.

Company: Mango Sciences

Website: www.mangosciences.com

Management:  Mohit Misra, Co-Founder & CEO

Founded Year: 2019

Headquarters: Boston, MA

Description: Mango Sciences is an emerging market data science company that connects millions of underrepresented patients to precision medicine.

Share This Article
Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *