Embrace digital opportunities 

While many organisations in the life sciences sector have been looking into the possibilities that digital technologies can present, many have not yet taken systematic, continuous, and ambitious steps to benefit from the new capabilities. Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review’s fourth annual study on digital maturity shows only around 20% of biopharma enterprises have reached a mature digital stage. How firms apply digital, scale learnings, collaborate, and support change differs from those in the earlier stages of digital maturity. More technologically advanced businesses also roll out digital projects gradually, starting with trial programmes and scaling up carefully after learning from their mistakes. 

Organisations have voluminous collections of unstructured physical and digital documents such as low-resolution PDFs, scanned documents, images, excel files, word files, emails, voice notes, and flat files that contain business data, operational data, healthcare records, clinical data, research data, manufacturing data, sales, and commercial data. 

Digitalisation will offer opportunities to execute efficiently, engage effectively, and innovate new products and services. It will aid in streamlining procedures to increase effectiveness, reduce prices, and create a digital culture that opens new perspectives and capabilities. Further, using digitised data and cutting-edge platforms, organisations can stimulate the development of new products, services, and business models to create value for their customers.  

Here are outline examples of potential digitalisation opportunities across functional areas in the life sciences sector:

Drug discovery

Transforming conventional human-led scientific methods by incorporating Artificial Intelligence into research would enable researchers to analyse molecular structures more quickly and identify potential molecules. 

Research scientists reported that their organisations are now making investments in AI (81%) and cloud (71%), according to a survey. Additionally, research professionals see the key value levers that may be realised through digital innovation as increasing research efficiency (95%), lowering drug development costs (76%), and increasing pipeline diversification (67%).

Drug development

Giving study deliverables more digital agility by redefining their nature from static papers that must be rewritten for each trial to living collections of digital pieces that may be constructed and disassembled per trial requirements. 

According to a survey report, pharmaceutical organisations are now prioritising cloud expenditures (80%) and AI investments (76%), both of which are important for developing new drugs. The main value levers that clinical leaders believe may be realised through digital innovation are the shorter time to market (76%), shorter time to evaluate data (65%), and lower study execution costs (57%).

Manufacturing

Productize and scale digital innovation by moving away from decentralised digitalisation initiatives, treating it as an internal engineering challenge, and utilising external resources through ecosystems and alliances to standardise digital innovation across manufacturing locations. 

Building smart factories necessitate not just allowing digital advancements but also changing the infrastructure and culture within the manufacturing organisation, according to a study on the biopharma factory of the future. The primary value levers identified by factory executives as being delivered through digital innovation include improving asset efficiency (100%), yield rates (67%), and safety and sustainability (50%).

Supply chain

By establishing a connection with other processes and removing the silos that once separated supply chain operations, it is possible to coordinate business planning and decision-making to increase organisational resilience. 

76% of the supply chain leaders who participated in a study said that their companies are already prioritising AI investments and are likely to do so in the future. Less than 50%, however, believe that over the next five years, investments in IoT and data lakes—which are probably crucial for improving supply chain visibility—should take precedence. Lowering customer cycle time (67%), decreasing lead times (57%), and enhancing delivery time accuracy (52%) are the main value levers achieved through digital technology investments, according to supply chain professionals.

Commercial

Sensing market dynamics proactively by deviating from a retrospective knowledge of factors like competition, patient perception, and marketing effect and towards a predictive strategy based on continuous learning. 

According to a survey, most businesses are currently prioritising cloud computing (68%) and AI (82%) investments to lay the groundwork for precision experiences. In addition, leaders in this domain who were surveyed feel that digital technology has the potential to expand access channels (64%), boost customer conversion (76%), and raise marketing and sales performance by (80%). 

The digital front door of pharmaceuticals

Currently, it takes 13 years and an average of €1.9 billion to bring a medicine to market, according to research in the Journal of Health Economics. But pharmaceutical companies hope to accelerate the drug discovery process by accessing enormous amounts of data with the aid of AI and other technologies and hope to reduce the length of the clinical trial cycle.

Many leading corporations have acknowledged the significance of digitization. According to an article in Financial Times, a group of 10 companies, including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and GSK, have joined forces to exchange priceless data using a safe, blockchain-based system that enables their machine learning algorithms for drug discovery to explore each other’s data without revealing trade secrets. They believe that the AI-driven collaboration may hasten the laborious and expensive process of identifying novel drugs by anticipating how molecules would behave.

The statistics in an article by Pharmaceutical Technology shed light on the biggest industry innovators.

Recently, Pfizer Inc. led the pharmaceutical industry in digitalization innovation. The firm, which has its headquarters in the United States, submitted 72 patents relating to digitalization. This increased from 66 over the same period in 2021. 

Johnson & Johnson of the United States, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. of Switzerland, and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of the United States followed with 57 digitalization patent applications. 

The data is compiled by GlobalData, tracking patent applications and grants from international offices. One of the main areas monitored by GlobalData is digitalization.

Life sciences organizations are now working with well-established and young digital businesses, and they recognize the advantages of participating in larger health ecosystems.  

It is now vital for them to build the digital skills they will need, make the financial expenditures required to harness the wealth of data, and join the rapidly developing digital ecosystems that have the potential to improve healthcare significantly. 

Read the original article here: https://datafoundry.ai/2022/09/opportunities-for-digitalization-in-pharma-life-sciences/

1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/be/Documents/life-sciences-health-care/DI_CHS-MIT-survey.pdf
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