Changing Trends in APAC
Pharmaceutical Industry
The Asia Pacific (APAC) region is diverse in terms of its demographics. It comprises developed countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia to emerging economy countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines including China and India. APAC pharmaceutical market is the second largest in the world after North America. It is anticipated that by 2021, the Asia Pacific market will have increased its lead over Western Europe which is currently in third place. This is attributed to several factors – size of the population especially the older population, GDP per capita, health expenditures, regulatory systems, physicians’ attitudes as well as disease incidence. With these economic indicators, the pharmaceutical industry in the region is adapting to new technologies, innovation and digital transformation to drive reforms in industry trends and to ensure that programs and initiatives in providing patient care become sustainable. Let us have a look at some of the key emerging trends:
Precision Medicine and Patient-centric Care
Precision medicine will be a key factor within the growing trend of personalised & specialized patient care in the region. With rising lifestyle diseases, a high-level understanding of the disease and individual needs of the patient will be required to make optimum use of all the new information and provide more effective care. For example, Merck has built a framework with the ultimate objective of delivering better patient outcomes. By listening and incorporating the voices of patient organisations, patient communities and carers, they are investing their efforts in areas where patients have expressed increased efforts to meet their needs. Merck is currently in close collaboration with patients to shape clinical trials and to deliver data that makes a true difference for patients. This is crucial to ensure that the endpoints and objectives of our trials are in the interest of the patient community.
Big Data for Predictive Care
Big data has proven to be a key enabler for new drug discoveries, and has improved clinical trials. This is where diagnosis and treatment of disorders is carried out using relevant data about a patient’s genetic make-up, environmental factors, and behavioural patterns.
With this approach, pharmaceutical companies can develop personalised medicines that are suitable for an individual patient’s genes and current lifestyle. Also, precision medicine can predict susceptibility to certain disorders and enhance disorder detection. For example, MediSapiens provides industry players in pharma, genomics, and healthcare with novel IT solutions to make sense out of the rapidly growing volume of biomedical data. The company’s technology suite tackles the challenges of data quality, data management of large data cohorts, and multi-omics analytics, allowing all the data sources to be combined and used together, to efficiently unlock valuable insights. The growing adaptation of genomics requires that that data needs to be effectively combined with clinical data for the best possible insights.
Advanced Medical Digital Devices
Digital health devices have supported people to gather data and track their health statistics effectively and on-the-go. For an individual, almost every smartphone’s operating system has a built-in app to make basic measurements in the background of our daily life. With the emergence of smart voices and voice capability services, it has become easy to monitor the patients on the go and address their needs.
Leading the APAC region, Japan’s medtech companies are flourishing with greater emphasis on innovation and R&D. For example, Medirom, a healthtech company based in Japan, has announced that it will be working with MATRIX Industries, a Silicon Valley material science company, to deliver the world’s first health monitoring smart-band that never requires charging named MOTHER. Another Japanese company, Xenoma, unveiled a new tech sleepwear that promises to monitor sleep and activity levels, as well as when a person has slipped or fallen. This builds on the company’s existing products, which include a smart tracksuit and shirt.
Embracing the Cloud
Cloud data management has played a transformative role in the industry of regulation. Cloud-based data systems can drastically speed up the drug regulation process. Currently, companies submit data to regulators via disjointed platforms and in closed templates. More and more facilities are choosing continuous manufacturing processes when introducing a new product. In addition, regulators continue to allay fears in the industry regarding approval delays for drugs produced using continuous manufacturing techniques. Cloud-based systems can streamline regulatory submissions by using a common data storage platform, which will help get treatments to patients faster. With on-Demand solutions offered from companies like AWS, it has become easy for suppliers to store large amounts of information and make it accessible for computing at their fingertips.
Continuous Manufacturing
Continuous manufacturing involves a pharmaceutical product being produced nonstop in one continuous manufacturing process. The entire process takes place in one facility, start to finish, without hold times. The benefits of continuous manufacturing includes:
- Reduced manufacturing costs, particularly in the long term
- Shorter production times – reducing manufacturing times from weeks to days is not unusual
- Reduces the risk of human error
- Improves quality
- Monitoring is more efficient as continuous manufacturing processes typically use automated monitoring techniques and predictive maintenance
- Increases efficiencies
- Reduces storage space
For example, GSK Singapore opened two continuous manufacturing facilities in 2019 to expedite its product and market launch, and improve its supply chain agility. GSK is among the early adopters of continuous processing, improving capacity and cutting costs and environmental impact by about 50%. GSK also said it has used the technology leap to develop digital technologies that speed up production.
