TechDogs-"Highly Prescribed Pharmaceutical Technology Trends Of 2021"

Pharmaceutical Technology

Highly Prescribed Pharmaceutical Technology Trends Of 2021

By TechDogs Editorial Team

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Overview

"The cold never bothered me anyway." Unlike Elsa, cold, cough, fever – everything bothers us. Whatever be the ailment, the Pharmaceutical industry is always ready with a remedy.

When the pandemic began, the Pharmaceutical industry rose to the occasion and witnessed rapid developments in terms of technology, practices and innovation. Technological advancements had always been fundamental in this industry. It was constantly upgrading conventional methods of diagnosis, developing medication and curing acute diseases. However, the question is, where are these technological advancements headed? Will the Pharmaceutical industry continue dodging bullets as and when they’re fired or approach healthcare in a preventive manner? (a bit of a brainteaser, eh?)

You know who’s got the answer – Grand Pabbie! We cannot get him here though – so we went with the next best thing – Pharmaceutical Technology Trends for 2021. These trends would tell you what you can expect from the Pharmaceutical industry going ahead.

Put on your Anna boots – it’s time to find some answers!
TechDogs-Mixing It Up-"Highly Prescribed Pharmaceutical Technology Trends Of 2021"
Unlike Anna’s frozen heart, not everything in this world can be cured by an act of true love (how we wish that was true!). We’ve always relied on diagnostics, medicines, injections, surgical treatments and other elixirs of life to combat ailments. In fact, the recent times and the rampant pandemic has proven that at the end of the day, the responsibility of keeping people alive lies not only in the hands of the brave doctors and nurses but also the Pharmaceutical industry. It’s only natural for the industry to leverage technology to offer advanced and effective solutions for modern-day healthcare issues.

Phamaceutical technology has been here for a long time. It has brought in monumental changes right from manufacturing, preparation and compounding to dispensing, packaging and storing of drugs leading to mass manufacturing, enhanced storage capabilities and more effective drugs.

While there’s no denying that technology has fueled tremendous economic growth, most of the technological advancements so far have been towards devising a better cure or finding a new one. Even though that was the need of the hour, the pandemic has also brought forth a bigger need–the need for preventive medication.

Vaccines, immunity boosters and inhibitors–we need more of those, now more than ever. Is the Pharmaceutical industry steering its technological boat in that direction now? Or are they planning to stay on the course? The answer, or a part of it, lies in knowing the technologies that are driving change in the Pharma industry.

Bringing together data and insights from industry experts, we’ve enlisted 5 trends that are laying out the foundation to where the world of Pharma is headed. Having said that, only time (and Grand Pabbie!) can tell us the approach, preventive or curative, that the Pharma industry would adopt these trends to. So? Do you wanna build a Snowman? Oops, we mean, do you want to read about the latest technological trends that are reshaping the Pharma industry? Let's go!
 

Trend 1: Artificial Intelligence (AI) To Deliver Newer, Better Drugs


TechDogs-Trend 1: "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) To Deliver Newer, Better Drugs-2D Image Of A Smartphone And A Human Character Checking On New Technology For Lungs Sound - AI Algorithms Helps To Remotely Monitor The Patients And Capture The Severity Of The Disease
So not leaving any industry behind, huh AI? Sometimes we feel we are making our own doomsday device but what can we say? Humans love technology, so does TechDogs (we have Tech in our name!) and for Pharma, it is for a good cause.

The most significant impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Pharma has been in developing new drugs. A major challenge in new drug development is to successfully pass clinical trials. AI lets Pharmaceutical companies automate data gathering and analysis such that it maps out all possible genes responsible for causing diseases and then finds drugs and components that target them all, increasing the success rate of these new drugs.

Karen Taylor, Director of the Centre for Health Solutions at Deloitte (Accounting & Consultancy group), says, "Drug discovery is being transformed through the use of AI, which is reducing the time it takes to mine the vast amounts of scientific data to enable a better understanding of disease mechanisms and identify new potential drug candidates."

Not just in drug discovery, AI also has allowed companies to examine existing drugs and repurpose them for curing rare diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In fact, especially for treating patients suffering from Parkinson’s and similar diseases, AI algorithms help in remotely monitoring the patients and capturing the severity of the disease. Using that, doctors are able to set adequate drug dosage.

AI has also made the pursuit of happyness, err, new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper and more effective–and pharma industry is not going to shy away from it.   

TechDogs’ Opinion: In the near future, it is evident AI is expected to play a monumental role in drug discovery and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases #YouGoAI. AI would also move towards revolutionizing clinical trials for the pharma industry. Through machine learning and image recognition algorithms, AI can ensure that participants take the necessary dosage of a particular drug at the right times (#drugadherence) to get accurate drug results. To further enhance result accuracy, AI and machine learning would analyze large high-quality custom datasets to identify targets and biomarkers which can quickly and accurately predict the effectiveness of drugs on in-vitro models of disease.
 

Trend 2: Advanced Manufacturing To Allow For Precision Medicine

 
How do you keep a snowman (remember Olaf!) from melting? Give them a snow cloud! #ModernProblemsRequireModernSolutions

Where standard solutions fail, you need a bit of customization. You’ve got customized outfits, customized cakes and customized digital experiences – so why not customized medication? That’s where the snow cloud, or precision medicine, comes in – a remedy based on your needs, anatomy and analysis of medical data. #EveryPatientIsUnique

Data analytics and drug exposure models determine the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of drugs to establish the right composition and dosage of drugs at an individual level based on age, sex, comorbidities and other clinical parameters. Advanced manufacturing based on single-use technology and additive manufacturing helps in producing small batches of drugs, making personalized medicine a reality.

Individualized cancer vaccine by Swiss startup Tepthera is a huge testament to this. It offers a platform that helps in the rapid identification of tumor-specific antigens and tumor-specific epitopes and monitors them to provide individualized therapeutic vaccines for treating their condition.

TechDogs’ Opinion: So far, precision medication has been widely adopted and leveraged in oncology. Going ahead, we can expect it to have wider, revolutionary applications beyond oncology, especially in treating rare and genetic diseases. In fact, it can come handy in treating the novel Coronavirus and its ever-growing variants too. With such a widescale adoption of precision medicine on the horizon, the development and importance of parallel learning and tools that health professionals would need to understand data and prescribe such medication will also increase significantly.
 

Trend 3: Natural Language Processing (NLP) To Match Patients With Clinical Trials

 
Enter the Trolls–with Grand Pabbie! While Natural Language Processing (NLP) doesn’t have the powers to transform the trolls into rocks–it can do the next best thing! NLP identifies written or spoken human language, extract its meaning and transforms it into insightful data. Everyone from Agnarr and his family to Kristoff and Sven leverage NLP (the trolls–keep up!) and so does the Pharmaceutical industry, especially for clinical trials.

According to Avenga, 86% of clinical trials are unable to recruit patients on time, mostly because 80% of the data collected in these trials is unstructured and requires manual scouting. NLP takes that away.

It is the Tinder for clinicians and trial patients–just that the matches here are based on data and not swipes! NLP converts all structured and unstructured information from patients’ medical records into a meaningful summary that can be used by clinicians to find characteristics that are most definitive for a trial and use those to shortlist trial options for a given drug. It helps in not only analyzing medical records but also individual doctor’s notes to find the most suitable patients for trials matching the requirements–that too in real-time, making the enrollment time much shorter.

TechDogs’ Opinion: Today, with a boom in technology, the Pharmaceutical sector has excelled in its reach with NLP when it comes to clinical trials. Going ahead, it is also expected to leverage NLP solutions for drug discovery, mining EHR (Electronic Health Record) data and improving the overall efficiency in the healthcare sector. In fact, this data mining would not just be limited to patients–but also for recruiting skilled doctors and researchers for clinical trials–by analyzing their practice record and expertise. Unlike Elsa, we are not heading into the unknown but towards actual success. Saw what we did there?  *Wink*
 

Trend 4: Blockchain To Bring Drug Authenticity Back


TechDogs-Trend 4: "Blockchain" To Bring Drug Authenticity Back-2D Image Of Medical Blockchain Network Concept - Distributed Ledger, Computer Connection Technology - Blockchain Holds Great Potential As A Unified Solution For Efficient And Secure Management Of Pharmaceutical Supply Chains Around The Globe - Blockchain Technology To Create An Incredibly Secure Database, Without The Patchwork Configuration Of Previous Supply Chain Technologies
Believe it or not, you’d come across a Prince Hans in every story–including the story of Pharmaceutical industry. A common impediment that the Pharma industry deals with is returned drugs. Wholesalers often overstock certain drugs expecting a higher demand and end up retuning the unused stock periodically. These returns are often compromised by counterfeit drugs aka Prince Hans. Blockchain can change this by offering a global Pharma supply chain.

A decentralized blockchain allows Pharmaceutical manufacturers to record the package serial number on blockchain. The authenticity check can happen from anywhere – be it from a lab in New York or the Arendelle kingdom!

Gunjan Bhardwaj, founder and CEO of Innoplexus shares that "Blockchain holds great potential as a unified solution for efficient and secure management of Pharmaceutical supply chains around the globe. By allowing multiple stakeholders to participate in distributing the network, it creates an incredibly secure database, without the patchwork configuration of previous supply chain technologies."

TechDogs’ Opinion: Blockchain is enough to keep the Pharma Hans at bay and bring in transparency and traceability in the Pharma supply chain. The benefits of blockchain would not be limited to manufacturers and vendors. Rather, it would benefit low and middle-income countries which often deal with substandard or falsified pills, vaccines and diagnostic kits. It would give the customers and wholesalers the ability to check authenticity by accessing the centralized data and check its updates in near real time.
 

Trend 5: Digital Therapeutics To Treat Diverse Medical Conditions


TechDogs-Trend 5: "Digital Therapeutics" To Treat Diverse Medical Conditions-2D image Of A Doctor Measuring Blood Pressure Of Patient - Digital Therapeutics To Be The Health Apps That Several Pharma Companies Are Planning To Develop To Improve Customer Experience
Raise your hand if you have a blood sugar monitor or digital blood pressure monitor at home. You may be raising your hand (or at least nodding in affirmation)!

Mobile fitness trackers, nutrition apps, wearable and wireless devices have already taken over our everyday lives–the way Olaf has taken over our hearts #SomePeopleAreWorthMeltingFor. These are building blocks for the world of digital therapeutics.

Pharmaceutical companies are actively providing “beyond-the-pill" solutions to solve health problems. These involve evidence-based therapeutic interventions that use software technology to treat mental, physical and behavioral ailments. Any tech-first solution that treats a health problem falls into this category – be it the CogniviveVR that helps patients recover from a stroke using virtual reality or Dopavision that acts as smartphone-based digital therapeutic for myopia by activating Dopamine release for eye-growth regulation.

Allied Market Research projects the global digital therapeutics market size to reach $13.8 billion by 2027. Digital therapeutics may even become more popular than Olaf–you never know!

TechDogs’ Opinion: A game-changer in digital therapeutics would be health apps that several Pharma companies are planning to develop to improve customer experience. Healthcare apps would make information about drugs and treatments readily available for patients. Not just that, they’d combine data from different trackers, sensors and wearables to present a complete picture about a patient’s health condition. It would also make it easier for patients to download reports, record medication time and keep a tab on their dietary metrics.
 

To Conclude


Quite evidently, the Pharmaceutical sector is evolving at an exponential rate. To thrive and strive in this environment, it has become inevitable for startups and large-scale companies to keep pace with the industry trends to tackle unforeseen challenges. This reform will not only bring profitability but also boost digital engagement between customers and Pharma companies.

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