Technologies That Will Reshape the Pharmaceutical Sector in 2024

The last few years have seen a period of accelerating technology adoption in the pharmaceutical sector due to factors such as pandemics, inflation, new therapeutic modalities and new ways of working. This has led to new strategies in sourcing, manufacturing, and supply chain operations.

The industry faces many challenging demands that technological advances will address. We review the technological trends that will redefine the pharmaceutical sector!

Pharma Tech Trends

Generative AI

Artificial intelligence has been improving the pharmaceutical industry for some years now, and the advent of generative AI will transform the stages of drug development, driving efficiency, clinical trials, and safety through automation, optimization, and advanced information.

LLMs can improve understanding of biology and molecular detection, improving the speed and quality of early drug discovery processes that can help unlock new therapies.

It will also be very useful in the clinical trial phase, as it can consider diverse patient populations and integrate numerous datasets with genomics, aiming to increase the success rate and optimize the trial design.

Data-driven drug development

Data is one of the most powerful assets for achieving significant breakthroughs in the discovery and development of new drugs, as well as new applications for existing compounds.

Data-driven research will provide an important competitive advantage due to three main factors:

• Macrodata: it is a valuable asset for developing new solutions, and data scientists use it to sift through the vast expanse of big data and extract useful information.
• AI: Artificial intelligence analyses data much faster than humans, so it can be used to pick out the important parts of research projects, analyze them, and generate new insights.
• Digital simulations: 90% of clinical trials fail, but this number improves if researchers introduce more compounds into the trial phase. However, this requires data collection, exploring different variables and comparing the new drug with existing treatments, and virtual simulations are tremendously helpful in this mission.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

IoT is one of the most widely deployed technologies in many industries, and the pharmaceutical sector will be able to benefit greatly from IoMT through the combination of mobile applications and IoT devices.

Many wearables are already being used to remotely monitor heart rate, blood pressure, or glucose levels, and as their use increases, better treatments and monitoring can be prescribed and monitored from anywhere.

This will allow decentralized clinical trials (DCT) to be conducted, lowering barriers to entry, widening access to trials, and improving patient convenience.

Personalized medicine

By using advanced analytics, ML, and the potential of quantum computing to obtain more useful information, clinical research will focus on generating personalized therapies that take into account the precise conditions of the individual patient rather than a general disease.

Bringing together various technologies can ensure that each stage in drug development is based on diverse, nuanced, and real patient populations. This understanding will help personalize therapies more effectively, better engage patients, and bridge the gap in research and clinical care.

Data transparency with blockchain

Governments and regulators around the world are emphasizing data transparency, quality assurance, and the need for greater traceability throughout the supply chain.

Blockchain technology is very important for the pharmaceutical industry in its various stages of drug production and distribution and can modernize the industry by introducing three key elements: privacy, transparency, and traceability.

It can be used to facilitate access to medical records, improve the supply chain, accredit suppliers, track drug pricing strategies, and so on. In fact, there is another use case approach where blockchain has a lot to say in the industry: tracking counterfeit or substandard medicines that can be very harmful to people.

Biotechnology Systems

Biotechnology systems open up a new paradigm for understanding the interrelationships between networks of biological processes. They are based on a technical procedure that allows data to be evaluated on a much larger scale and completely changes the way biological and biotechnological research is conducted.

Applications range from building bioprocesses for producing pharmaceuticals, commodities, and fine chemicals to manufacturing fuels, polymers, and other materials. As a result, successful industrial biotechnology can be established and grow exponentially.

Genetic Editing

Gene editing is crucial for pharmaceutical development; through technology, gene editing involving specific RNA to guide an endonuclease to a selected sequence to be edited is enabled.

This simplifies the process of removing, adding, or modifying genes in a much simpler way. It is a scalable method, so researchers can look at many genes quickly. This translates into numerous advantages in direct repair (as opposed to current gene therapies that rely on additional gene copies), leading to accelerated drug discovery.

2024 will be the year in which the pharma industry will not only evolve but revolutionize the way medicines are manufactured, researched, and distributed. Moreover, the patient will be at the center of this transformation, with the aim of offering safer, more effective, personalized, and accessible treatments.

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