How technology can transform drug development pipelines for better patient outcomes
Subhro Mallik, senior vice president, head of Life Sciences, Infosys explores how advances in data and technology had help with the development of future drugs.
Home to GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, two of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, the United Kingdom (UK) is a major centre of drug development. It has given the world several blockbuster drugs for the treatment of cholesterol, asthma, and depression. In 2020, spending on R&D in the UK pharmaceutical sector reached an eight-year high, jumping 6.9% annually to £4.8 billion.
As one of the more insulated industries in the wake of Covid-19, the pharmaceutical industry is rallying behind global demand for a vaccine, further boosting drug research and discovery. However, costs of drug development and time to market continue to be the topmost challenges for pharma players. A recent study led by the London School of Economics and jointly conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and KU Leuven, Belgium, puts the average cost of drug development at nearly US $1.3 billion. This expenditure is significant, considering that the overall time taken from drug discovery to commercialisation and market sales is nearly 10-12 years. Today, the pharma industry is under pressure to provide greater transparency into drug development costs to justify soaring drug prices.
Challenges with drug development and data transparency
The past few years have seen the emergence of several novel drugs such as specialty drugs for rare disorders or orphan diseases like acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) or non-tuberculosis mycobacterium (NTM) that address unmet clinical needs. But the process of commercially launching a drug is complicated. The journey of successful drug commercialisation is a multi-departmental and multi-organisational effort that must be co-ordinated across the pre as well as post-launch lifecycle.
Some of the major contributors to the complexity in drug development and drug launches are:
- The expanding pharma ecosystem – Pharma operations include new players like healthcare organisations, healthcare professionals, and payers. Distribution channels involve payers as well as patients. The needs of these various stakeholders need to be considered when planning a drug launch. It should provide market access, enhance sales effectiveness, develop distribution networks, and enable support programs. Designing relevant patient journeys, patient access, and patient engagement as well as appropriate health plans and contracting for payers are key challenges in this expanding ecosystem.
- Data integration – During drug development, data flows in from multiple sources in a non-standardised manner. Research labs adopting the latest medical research devices now have access to digital outputs, many of which do not automatically sync with existing drug development platforms. Stakeholders like sales, marketing, finance, and manufacturing teams also need access to data in easily consumable formats. Setting the right expectations is crucial to develop a winning market access strategy. Equipping the sales team and field force with the right technologies is needed for better patient and customer experience.
- Rising costs – Trends like contract manufacturing help contain the steep costs associated with drug development and reduce time to market. Alongside this, healthcare providers must also consider compliance, demand for patient-focused apps, securing patient data, tier-based pricing, and outcome-based business models. There is a need for strong playbooks across sales and IT that leverage data in an omni-channel manner.
According to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), drug development should include practices and processes that ensure safety, stability and reliability of all active ingredients during the development lifecycle as well as storage, distribution and dissemination. Achieving this within the current drug development models is very difficult in pandemic-like situations, due to supply chain disruptions and limited communication. This is where visibility becomes paramount. This is a prime opportunity for pharma to look to other industries and learn from their digital successes on how to apply technology for unprecedented efficiencies.
Propelling pharma into the future with data science
The wearable medical device market is surging in popularity over the past few years, growing to more than US $29 billion in 2019. This spurt reflects consumer sentiment when it comes to health. Soon, connected health solutions will be the norm. Pharma companies can lead the way by implementing solutions that facilitate remote drug monitoring and adherence. This will assist healthcare providers in improving early detection and diagnosis of rare diseases. Further, the rise of digital biomarkers – behavioural parameters that can be measured by wearables or implants – will give diagnosticians better inputs and improve treatment journeys.
The vision of improving early detection and diagnosis of diseases is possible by a merger of cloud, data, and digital technologies. These fundamentally transform how pharma companies capture insights about drug discovery, development milestones, market access bottlenecks, patient outcomes, and treatment journeys. Such an approach can support in-built repeatable processes that capture data using APIs and allow configurations based on product position in the development or sales lifecycle. Alongside this, modular solutions like a data-first platform will drive key business outcomes by supporting pharma companies to onboard next-gen technologies, like AI, for better forecasting. For instance, it can tap into historic data to predict clinical events and therapy transitions.
Some of the top benefits delivered by the convergence of cloud, data and digital are:
- Effective drug development – Analytics solutions, when applied on a single source of truth of data collated from massive, multiple, and globally distributed datasets, can identify patterns that humans cannot, leading to more efficacious and innovative drugs.
- Scalability across portfolios – Pharma companies will be able to track patient outcomes quickly and accurately for better insights into drug performance. Additionally, the platform will be able to incubate and scale innovation as per the business needs while using analytics to tackle therapeutic complexity.
- Understanding of prescriber behaviour and experience – Platform-led data-driven approaches can help identify the right patient population, regulate off-label use, access payer knowledge and processes, and capture country-specific rules for drug approvals – all of which are important in the drug commercialisation lifecycle.
- Improve sales effectiveness – Coupled with discovery insights and multi-channel marketing capabilities, such a platform can boost sales across channels and track persona-based analytics. This will unlock new frontiers for revenue by helping sales reps leverage different approaches and tactics for sales effectiveness. It will also give sales and field force teams access to information at their fingertips for better decision-making.
As a country, the UK plays to its advantages of strong partnerships, distributed models for novel drug development, and a best-practices led approach to designing drug experiments. Smart digital models can help the pharma industry understand spend, allocate resources, and feed remote business models more effectively, all while developing market-viable drugs and maintaining a constant feedback loop for continuous innovation and improvements.