Pharma October 2016

Page 21

How Technology is Bringing Revolution in Pharma and Bio-Pharma Industry This article discusses the role that technology and data is already playing within the pharma and bio-pharma industry and how future digital innovation will enable the changing landscape of these industries.

T

he 21 st century is the century of technology. After the advancement of computers and internet during the 20 th century, no industry is left untouched. The technology now plays most important role in business processes in all industries across the globe. Every 1.5 years our technical capabilities are almost doubled, as predicted by Moore's Law. In last 10 years or so we have seen a big boom in Pharma and Biopharma industry too. Pharma and Bio-Pharma continues to evolve with expectations of a positive future. Much of this expectation is driven by pressure for the next blockbuster thing, demand for better processing technologies, and by concerns about weak development pipelines. A lot of the drive for change will come from the new electronic and medical technologies that are in development at the moment. Faster and more powerful computing will spearhead the advancement, enabling researchers to perform more gruesome tasks and tackle more demanding problems in silico. Similar to the airline industry, more design and testing, eventually even preclinical and clinical testing, will be done virtually. In parallel, the global communication network will connect everyone and allow the instantaneous and secure sharing o f information. Patient rec ords , drug development data, messages, ideas, instructions and many other things are already being transmitted around the world through the technology.

Phanish Chandra CEO Docplexus 24 ď‚ƒOctober 2016

In order to bring about the revolution in healthcare that modern IT promises, there are legal, technical and cultural/societal barriers that must be addressed. Similarly, costeffective rapid evaluation of new technologies is pivotal to the industry achieving this expected progress in the Pharma and Bio-Pharma sector. However, evaluating and implementing new technologies in the regulated pharmaceutical environment

can be sometimes slow and costly to both innovators and to the end-users in the Pharma and Bio-Pharma industry. Patients are increasingly getting connected to the healthcare network, yet at the same time less inconvenienced by it. The treatments patients take will be better suited to their needs, and their response to it will be observed. This will require pharma to communicate with doctors and other healthcare providers to gather more real time data and to connect with the real end-user the patient through doctors. More efficacious, personalized and specialized drugs can have a higher price, but on the other hand a drug that does not work will abolish from the market. In future, outcome-based sales and payments will keep entire pharma industry on it's toes while reassuring healthcare professionals that they are providing the best treatment available. Targeted therapeutics and associated diagnostics developed with the help of powerful computing technology will require smaller clinical trials and be faster and cheaper to bring to market. The resulting reduction in the importance of the blockbuster model need not mean lower pharma incomes. How Technology Impacts Pharma Sector? Internal business processes such as finance, accounting and planning were first to taste the success of technology. Engineering and manufacturing divisions were next in line to implement widespread technological solutions in the Pharma industry. However, other crucial functions such as marketing and sales still have not implemented technological transformation as they should have. Technology in Manufacturing Manufacturing divisions were on the forefront of implementation of the technology. It makes Pharma Bio World


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