Greater funding and focus put Russia firmly on the map in digital healthcare

Russia’s arrival as a major player in the digitalization of healthcare was abundantly clear at a Moscow event held to celebrate and stimulate advances in the sector.

The narrative at Friday’s Digital Pharma Conference was a familiar one for many observers of this space internationally – a story of enormous potential and demand that is creating fast growth and improved outcomes for patients.

Russia’s digital economy grew last year by 59%, while the country's economy as a whole achieved growth of 7%.

What makes this rate of growth remarkable is that access to funding to support tech projects has not been widely available until relatively recently in Russia.

Speedy progress

Eugene Borisoff is development director of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), the Russian government-backed venture capital fund and accelerator that co-sponsored the conference.

When the IIDF launched in 2013, Mr Borisoff told The Pharma Letter that there was no ecosystem for tech entrepreneurs to play the venture game.

Since then, through educating students about opportunities and business models, taking 400 start-ups onto its accelerator program, supporting companies and introducing many of them to investors and international markets, IIDF has become the most active early-stage venture fund in Russia and Europe, according to Dow Jones.

Interest from big pharma

A few of them, including Robot Vera, an artificial intelligence tool designed for recruiting, have gained worldwide attention, and in digital health specifically, Semantic Hub is attracting attention for its potential to use machine learning in pharmaceutical R&D.

Some 15 of the companies in IIDF’s pipeline are in digital health. Big pharma has taken an interest, including AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN) by partnering with the telemedicine startup Qapsula, while another start-up that has produced a nebulizer to reduce the side effects of drugs for diseases such as tuberculosis, has been in discussions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“There is now a focus to invest in this area and create solutions for pharma,” Mr Borisoff said.