Over the last few decades, there has been an outstanding level of innovation in pharmaceutical and biotechnology R&D.
Disease management has also radically changed and innovated. But experts and investors in the industry admit that the industry is slow to embrace the new digital era and to make possible the use of advanced technology to help with the digitalization of clinical research.
To understand the state of digitalization in biopharmaceutical R&D, 250 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology leaders were recently surveyed by Accenture.
Apart from some progress being made, it was found that there was a gap in the expected value of digital in R&D and actions being taken to realize that value.
COVID-19 has emphasized the need for digitalization for business continuity and virtual data access concerning employees, collaboration partners, and patients.
Let’s see what has been conveyed by Tom Lehmann, managing director in Accenture’s Life Sciences business who co-led the study for Accenture, about what can be done by pharmaceutical companies to become a digital reality.
What are groundbreaking examples of digitalization in the Biopharma industry?
Earlier this year, a drug molecule entirely invented by artificial intelligence was put into human clinical trials by the Oxford-based Exscientia and the Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, in collaboration with each other. This is one of the good examples of digitalization in the industry.
This new compound was created to help patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Four to six years are typically taken by the drug candidates to reach human clinical trials, but it took only just 12 months to reach that stage.
COVID-19 has emphasized the need for investigating opportunities to expedite both the discovery and development stages of new vaccines and other life-impacting treatments.
One of the widespread challenges in the industry is to leverage tech to help find the right people for the right trials. This is another example of how the biopharma industry can be improved by digital solutions.
As part of the larger healthcare bot initiative, a new Clinical Trials Bot was rolled out by Microsoft in 2019. The purpose behind designing it was to create automatic chat programs for triaging patients.
Patients and their doctors can easily find clinical trials related to a particular illness with the help of the trials bot. Links to trials that match a patient’s needs can be suggested if you ask the bot to explore studies.
Are people unaware of this tech in the industry?
We all know the importance of digitalization, especially after COVID-19. It was felt by only one in four respondents in a study conducted in 2016 that digital capabilities would improve R&D productivity and help drive patient outcomes.
Another survey was conducted in 2019 whereby 72% of respondents said that they thought digital would drive success in achieving key strategic R&D imperatives.
With the atmosphere created by COVID-19, there was a rise in telemedicine and biopharma companies that wanted to virtualize clinical trials and were interested in remote working solutions for scientists in labs.
This was in accordance with what respondents already recognized as key strategic imperatives which they said they wanted to focus their digitalization efforts.
To be more focused on patient outcomes and to improve R&D productivity, they wanted to use digital. So, there’s buy-in. This is happening because of the challenge.
Why digitalization is a challenge?
One of the primary issues seems to be risk aversion. Almost two-thirds of the respondents to a survey believed that due to risk aversion they are being prevented from being fully able to support digitalization.
Notably, the number jumps to 75% in companies where market caps are above $10 billion. But definitely, the adoption of digital technologies in R&D is not prevented by it.
It has been seen that most life sciences organizations have adopted some kind of digitalization. Many organizations are struggling with how to measure those digital capabilities.
Though we can see that there are often digital use cases to meet a need at a point in time, there is no focus to make that digital use case recurrent and workable.
How can it be dealt with?
Senior R&D leadership or C-suite needs to initiate the drive to digitalize. Digitalization is being driven enterprise-wide in the opinion of less than half of the respondents. It is generally driven within individual R&D functions.
The question here is “How can new technologies be ingrained into our new techniques of working and generate real value?” if senior leadership validates and look forward to it.
But we are also noticing other hurdles to broader-scale adoption of digital that need to be managed as well.
What are the barriers to the broader-scale adoption of digital?
Metrics is one problem. About 60% of respondents struggled to estimate the success of digitalization, specifically since in many cases it’s still fresh and new.
If the feedback received is in favor of it, then also the question of its effectiveness persists. And in case people feel that old ways of doing things were good enough, then it is difficult to make people come out of their comfort zone.
Moreover, budgets and funding issues are also there. The majority of the respondents face the problem of not being sufficiently funded to handle digitalization.
Furthermore, another barrier is talent. Nearly 34% revealed an inability to attract the correct skills and talent and 46% cited a lack of access to IT resources as stopping them from executing change.
The new skills required by digitalization are not always resident in a conventional R&D organization.
How can biopharma companies conquer these barriers?
From the start determine how you will estimate success and use those metrics to create a case for sustainable digital investment. Convey those objectives and be disciplined in tracking both prime indicators and the actual impact delivered.
It’s also beneficial to value the intangibles as organizations gain from failures, see the advantage of cross-functional collaboration, and initiate pivot during their digital rotation.
For many companies, currently, it’s about creating momentum, displaying value, and keeping your eye on scaling your triumph.
It’s certainly a journey and with the right plan of action and roadmap and with determined leadership support, an organization will recognize the advantages of digitalisation
