Entrepreneurs are betting on apps that improve—or just replace—prescription medication.
What if an app could replace a pill? That's the big question behind an emerging trend known as “digital therapeutics.” The idea: software that can improve a person's health as much as a drug can, but without the same cost and side-effects.
Digital therapeutics, or “digiceuticals,” as some call them, have become a Holy Grail in some quarters of Silicon Valley, where investors see the chance to deliver medicine through your smartphone. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm, even predicts digital drugs will become “the third phase” of medicine, meaning the successor to the chemical and protein drugs we have now, but without the billion-dollar cost of bringing one to market.
