Rise of Digital in Drug Development
Digital is no longer a new business strategy for consumer driven industries. With huge influx of structured and unstructured data over shooting the confines of atmosphere, it has become quite easy to predict key trends, gain strategic insights, influence customer behavior, enhance future innovation and feed the pipeline of products. Data Analytics is like a laser beam that strikes the real time activity and captures the growth potential for emerging startups and established business centers.
According to a recent report by McKinsey, the digital era, for all its stomach-churning speed and volatility, serves up more information about the competitive environment than yesterday’s strategists could ever imagine. Simultaneously, analytically backed, rapid test-and-learn approaches have opened new avenues to help companies correct course while staying true to their strategic goals. [1]
In the healthcare and pharmaceutical world, R&D processes, manufacturing, retailers, patients, and caregivers are the major contributors to the data growth. Data analytics plays a major role in discovery and development of innovative drugs.
Predictive analytics is the emerging analytical technique for real-time management of the environmental challenges faced by the industry players. It uses many techniques – data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. There are various ways with which it can fast track the innovation in drug development from discovery to approval stage.
Here are the top three ways how incorporating the data analytics can prove promising to the pharmaceutical world:
1. Drug discovery technologies and Analytical Techniques
In pharmaceuticals, predictive modeling of biological processes can help identify new potential candidate molecules with a higher probability of being successfully developed and approved. Smart algorithms and Artificial Intelligence can empower discovery teams to leverage the diversity of available molecular and clinical data and predict the potential compounds or combinations for a wide range of therapeutics. By connecting the dots and the integration of data, a comprehensive search for subsets of data is possible based on the linkages established rather on the standalone information itself. Therefore, integration of vast amount of new data will determine the key analytical capabilities of a pharmaceutical company.
2. Growth of Personalized Medicine and Diagnostics:
Companies need to connect patient genotypes to clinical-trial results to identify opportunities for improving the identification of responsive patients. Pfizer is delivering a program called “Precision Medicine Analytics Ecosystem,” which connects the dots among genomic, clinical trial, and electronic medical recorded data. This helps in quickly delivering new drugs for specific patient populations. Developments like this would make personalized medicine and diagnostics an integral part of the drug-development process rather than an afterthought and would lead to new discovery technologies and analytical techniques. [2]
3. Digital pills and Remote Monitoring Devices
Pharmaceutical companies can install smart devices to analyze a quantum of real-world data that was not previously available to scientists. Digital evolution in smart phones and their apps has resulted in the meteoric growth of advanced health measurement devices. Remote-monitoring devices can track patients’ adherence to their prescriptions. There is an emerging digital health tool, the smart pill, in the US market. This is first of its kind drug, which is used to treat patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. It was FDA approved for use in humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017.[3] Such examples of smart pills that can release drugs and relay patient data, that help track usage, adherence and can be used to facilitate R&D, analyze drug efficacy, enhance future drug sales that combine the provision of drugs and services.
Technology and mobile providers are offering services such as data feeds, tracking, and analysis to complement medical devices and decrease health-care costs and earlier identification of health issues.
Are companies ready?
Data analytics and in-depth industry knowledge empowers leading pharmaceutical organizations with better decision-making capabilities through licensing evaluation, competitive landscape, pricing analysis, forecasting, and market entry analysis.
According to a recent study by McKinsey, manufacturing and the oil and gas sectors are leading their way in their journey to digitization while pharma and chemical industries are still in their nascent stage. It can be threatening to individuals and companies who are slow to embrace the change and respond to the digital transformation in almost every sector, the much-needed change.
Digital Strategy works best when implemented in conjunction with doctors and patients in a collaborative manner. There is nothing more important than keeping an element of trust and medical ethics between a patient and healthcare provider on the top priority.
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References:
1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/digital-strategy-the-four-fights-you-have-to-win
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/pharmaceuticals-and-medical-products/our-insights/how-big-data-can-revolutionize-pharmaceutical-r-and-d
3. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-smart-pills-dumb-medical-experts.html