Pharmaceutical Industry: The Opportunity to Digitize
Efficiency, quality, and accuracy are crucial aspects along with timely delivery for the pharmaceutical industry. The industry is gradually taking the digital leap, yet the transformation is yet to happen as most of these pharma companies haven’t completely adopted the advanced technologies and operating models. They need to focus on their digital and analytics ambitions to achieve their transformation goals for futuristic pharmaceuticals of new and advanced cures by applying faster and leaner processes to enhance quality and minimize the pharma manufacturing costs and capacity constraints.
Pharma Manufacturing and Digital Transformation
| “Pharma executives expect smart connected factories to produce total savings of 20% or more, while improving quality and making deliveries more reliable.” |
Image Courtesy: Bain & Company
The pharmaceutical industry is looking forward to digital technologies and innovation to transform their business operations, productivity, and profitability. Digital transformation in pharma manufacturing is making its way to smart connected factories of Industry 4.0 that are forecasted to save an overall 20% in manufacturing and production costs. It counts as a 17% cost reduction related to poor quality and a 15% saving cost in converting raw materials into drugs, with a 14% improvement in overall delivery reliability.
Though these forecasted stats attract the leading players and their dedicated chief digital and technology officers (CDTOs) of the pharmaceutical industry, the adoption is limited to early-stage drug discovery and clinical development only, which helps to reduce the timelines and increase the success probability by a significant margin. The industry and its leadership need to widen their peripheral vision and expand the adoption to other processes for operational excellence. Some of these leading players in the pharmaceutical industry have introduced advanced technologies to revive their interactions with researchers, healthcare providers, and patients that help to personalize and enhance experiences to achieve speedy recovery and improved treatment outcomes.
Pharmaceutical Industry, Manufactures & the Digital Technologies
Image Courtesy: Bain & Company
In 2025, we can expect more development of scalable digital ecosystems for the pharmaceutical industry where companies can switch to cloud applications and emerging technologies, update their legacy applications, systems, and processes to transform experiences, increase efficiency, and save expenses to boost revenue figures. Let’s discuss the transformational changes the pharma industry can experience with new-age technologies to drive innovation, achieve operational efficiency, and better business outcomes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning for Pharma
The pharmaceutical industry has explored a multitude of applications and advancements, including drug discovery, drug development, risk estimators, clinical trials, prediction of patient improvement outcomes, and more from various 360-degree digital healthcare solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps pharma manufacturers speed up their drug discovery using large datasets to search and identify potential drug targets, forecast drug efficacy, and even optimize clinical trials for accuracy in less time.
| “Machine-learning software — one of the most powerful techniques under the AI umbrella — is programmed and trained by experts, using huge sample data sets that have been painstakingly categorized by humans, to look for patterns and to call out those that matter, as defined by experts who’ve identified what counts as a good or bad result, or a notable finding.”
– Pfizer |
In the recent past, during the COVID-19 age, we have seen Pfizer Inc. – an American multinational Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Corporation successfully leveraged AI-powered applications, data, and other supercomputing to accelerate the discovery, clinical development, manufacturing, distribution, and commercialization to introduce PAXLOVID – Pfizer’s COVID–19 oral treatment to the world. The use of these technologies made Pfizer scientists discover the right molecules to deliver PAXLOVID as an oral medication rather than intravenously. During Pfizer’s PAXLOVID clinical trials, the cumulative effect of AI and ML helped them perform quality-checks and massive patient data analysis 50% faster than before for faster development.
| “GSK’s world-leading AI/ML capability, including our dedicated in-house hub in London, is applying a predictive and data-driven approach to drug discovery and clinical trials with the aim of improving the success rates of new medicines. We look forward to leveraging both PathAI’s expertise and models to advance GSK’s proprietary AI models and focus on designing better models to deliver improved treatment options for patients with cancer and NASH.”
SVP Global Head of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at GSK |
Similarly, GlaxoSmithKline – a British multinational Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Company, has collaborated with Onyx for a DataOps transformation for building a comprehensive data and machine learning ecosystem to apply predictive analysis and data-driven approach for faster drug discovery and clinical trials for more improved and informed decision-making and more effective patient care.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and data analytics is not limited to drug research, development, and manufacturing but to enhance patient care. These AI-powered tools help to tailor patient treatments based on patient data and response to medication, whereas other AI-powered tools enable the development of treatments tailored to individual patient characteristics to offer more effective and targeted medication and therapies.
Digital pills are more or less the gist of such advancements in personalized patient care, where they contain an ingestible sensor that gives patient insights to healthcare providers to observe and analyze patient care and medication efficiency. Following that technology of digital pills, we have Abilify MyCite (aripiprazole tablets with sensor) – the U. S. FDA-approved drug that contains a digital ingestion tracking system for the treatment of schizophrenia, depression in adults, and acute treatment of manic and mixed episodes associated with bipolar-I disorder.
Big Data Analytics for Pharma
The pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry is gradually and cautiously introducing digital technology to reinvent decision-making, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. Big data is a ‘big relief’ for the pharma industry as it enables them to enhance drug development, quality checks, supply chains, operational processes, and patient care.
Image Courtesy: Compliance Quest
The use of a Pharmaceutical Quality Management System (QMS) enables informed decisions based on data analytics and real-time monitoring. These insights help pharmaceutical manufacturers find and identify quality concerns in drugs to save lives, money, and brand reputation.
With Big Data, pharma manufacturers can easily apply Agile and DevOps principles and collaboratively build a data stack for more seamless, faster, and reliable data workflows for better decision-making to achieve improved planning accuracy, inventory levels, manufacturing efficiency, and productivity. Pharma manufacturers can also integrate ready-available Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) that empower the pharma value chain, R&D, medical, patient care, and other functions. Digital transformation in pharma manufacturing allows industry players to fully integrate their research, trials, and supply chain processes to improve operational efficiency.
Novartis, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical corporation, also introduced cloud and data technologies for research, development, and production operations. Data analysis and insights help them to understand and identify what medicines are needed by society. Accordingly, they can accelerate their research, clinical trials, and manufacturing for the timely availability of cures.
Video Courtesy: Novartis
According to Loic Giraud, the head of Novartis’ Business Analytics Center of Excellence also explains that “Until a few years ago, the company was using a largely on-premises infrastructure for its data analytics and data science, but this created too big of a gap between the needs of the business and the speed at which teams could conduct tests and bring new products to market. From initial research through manufacturing, trials, and distribution, it can take around 12 years to bring a new drug to market. By applying data and artificial intelligence to these processes, Novartis believes it can reduce that time to 9 years.”
The digitalization of the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry can significantly improve their research, manufacturing, and supply chain processes for improved healthcare. By applying ‘Big Data’ analytics, pharma companies can streamline and optimize clinical trial design, identify potential safety issues, mitigate risk, and speed up new drug development.
Roche, a Swiss multinational holding healthcare company, has been quick to adopt digital technologies like IoT to connect and monitor its diagnostic products manufacturing equipment to ensure better product quality, minimize waste, and enhance efficiencies for more effective and targeted treatment.
| “The manufacturing industry is moving toward the use of digital technologies. Adopting and evolving these practices will help us in delivering value to patients, customers, businesses, and our employees.”
Global Head of Diagnostics Operations at Roche |
At Roche, they started using global data mesh technology to track various production metrics and created analytical tools. The data hub dashboards, live production, and testing information help manufacturing teams to visualize real-time quality data; so with the help of these trends and dashboards, the manufacturing teams can now accurately predict test results so they can make faster adjustments to save efforts and resources, and ensure better product quality.
Blockchain Technology for Pharmacology & Pharma
Since the quality and legitimacy of drugs and other medical equipment are directly connected to human lives, transparency and security are a must for the pharma industry and its integrity. The digital revolution by blockchain technology transformed the pharmacology, supply chain, and drug traceability for enhanced transparency, security, and compliance in the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry.
Blockchain is a game-changing introduction to the pharmaceutical industry as it is a decentralized, chronological, and impermeable digital ledger system built by interconnected blocks where each block accommodates a number of transactions to keep track of development and processes like Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS). As data cannot be altered or modified after it gets recorded in a block, it automatically ensures ultimate transparency and security.
As a result, pharmaceutical companies are relying on blockchain technology for quality assurance, tracking the drug and vaccine movement throughout the supply chain, mitigating counterfeit drugs, ensuring authenticity, and facilitating quicker responses to drug and vaccine recalls, and data integrity for transparency, patient safety, and security. It keeps the sequential, detailed, and unchangeable records of each batch of medication, including raw materials origin, production process, quality control (QC) checks, and distribution channels.
If a drug manufacturer integrates blockchain to secure and monitor the pharmaceutical supply chain, so whenever a drug is interacted with through manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, and sales, the blockchain will record and track each transaction to ensure the security and transparency of a pharma product’s journey as well streamline and enhance compliance and regulations. VeChain, a leading blockchain technology platform provider company, helped Bayer Co. Ltd., a pharmaceutical company in Shanghai, China, to develop Csecure. Csecure is a traceability platform for clinical trial supply chains that keeps records and track of clinical trial supply chain data to enhance transparency and security in their clinical trial supply chain process.
Other Emerging Trends for Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences
With digitization, the pharmaceutical industry is quite advanced in adopting technologies and their futuristic applications. For the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, the use of technologies has a wider approach, such as Digital therapeutics (DTx), telemedicine, digital twins, Extended Reality (XR), and more.
Digital Therapeutics (DTx) uses software or applications to deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions directly to patients to prevent, manage, or treat disorders, diseases, or medical conditions and improve patient health. Kaia Health MSK (musculoskeletal) digital therapeutic solution is one example of using software or applications to get accurate physical therapist-like therapies. We all know about telemedicine to remotely monitor and consult patients for easy accessibility of healthcare services and to enhance patient engagement. In Extended Reality (XR), we have the right blend of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to enhance learning and training, simulation-based practice, and more to increase the accuracy of healthcare providers.
Beyond these applications and the advancement of the pharma industry, digitization has the potential to transform the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry significantly. We have healthcare professional portals, digital commerce platforms, and other technologies to accelerate digitization for a better pharmaceutical and healthcare ecosystem. As the pharma industry is taking a turn towards digitalization, the primary challenge is to get an experienced technology partner to integrate technology into the experience and realize their dreams. At Krish, we have experienced experts with their consultation to analyze your requirements, align them with your vision, and help to integrate technologies to develop state-of-the-art, adaptive, and responsive healthcare professional portals, digital applications, and digital commerce platforms to gain a competitive advantage. By harnessing digital solutions, pharma companies can look for more agile and smarter manufacturing, exceptional quality, and personalized medication in the pharma production environment.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that digital innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is a must-have disruption to face growing challenges like supply chain complexity, personalized medicine, increasing price and cost pressure, and globalization. In order to break through the boundaries of today’s pharma manufacturing ecosystem and patient care experience, pharma companies need to adopt digital capabilities to significantly transform their operations and processes. They must develop solutions within their own capacity; they don’t need to hesitate to collaborate with external partners with expertise and experience for developing, integrating, and maintaining their digital presence. Digitization of the pharma industry helps to achieve accurate planning and productivity and enhance manufacturing efficiency to provide better healthcare for patients.
Table of Content
- Pharmaceutical Industry: The Opportunity to Digitize
- Pharma Manufacturing and Digital Transformation
- Pharmaceutical Industry, Manufactures & the Digital Technologies
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning for Pharma
- Big Data Analytics for Pharma
- Blockchain Technology for Pharmacology & Pharma
- Other Emerging Trends for Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences
- Conclusion
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Nishit specializes in assisting brands and businesses unlock maximum growth through digital transformation and optimizing operations. With a passion for strategic discussions, he excels at improvising strategies to generate revenue and expand customer bases. Beyond his professional endeavors, Nishit enjoys traveling and connecting with new people, sharing experiences, and engaging in conversations about technology.
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