Access, Affordability, and Innovation
AI, the Inflation Reduction Act, and a surge in precision medicine; experts look at pharma’s future.
| 2 min read | Opinion
What we asked: “Looking ahead to the next 5–10 years, what will be the key disruptors and/or what can be improved upon in the pharma industry?”
Response from: Maureen Ladouceur, president, Norstella (Citeline's parent company)
What strikes me the most is the quality of drugs that are now being brought to market. Recent years have seen record approval numbers, but an increasing proportion of these are breakthrough and first-in-class drugs, with meaningful improvements on patient outcomes. Some notable examples include HIV prophylactics, checkpoint inhibitors for solid tumors, and novel cystic fibrosis drugs that are extending lifespans.
This is largely driven by tremendous scientific innovation in terms of our understanding of diseases and how to go about designing the most appropriate therapy, harnessing the wide range of drug technologies now available. In the industry of old, improved formulations or patient convenience were accepted and rewarded as innovation, whereas today, we have many examples of pharmaceuticals causing dramatic shifts in how diseases are defined, how patients are diagnosed, and long-term treatment outcomes.
The challenge for the future is one of access. It is incumbent on drug developers to innovate in how they bring medicines to market in a way that as many patients as possible can benefit. Accelerating R&D timelines and controlling costs will help, alongside generating evidence that supports broad and equitable reimbursement at a sustainable price point. Novel therapies must be designed with such scalability from the outset – and not just cater to a narrow proportion of a drug’s label.
Response from: Melissa Green, Head of Global Marketing, at TekniPlex Healthcare
The previous decade has seen several disruptors that have substantially impacted drug development prioritization (small molecule versus large molecule and biologics), target disease states (more focus on orphan diseases and personalized medicine), administration strategies (oral delivery versus injectables), development cost, and the process by which R&D is orchestrated. These game-changers include artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, inflation (and the corresponding U.S. Inflation Reduction Act), and an increasingly competitive environment where drug companies vie for similar patient populations.
While almost every cost in the profit and loss equation is rising, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US is forcing drug prices downward, prompting the pharmaceutical industry to focus on cost-cutting on an unprecedented scale, which includes making hard choices regarding drug development pipelines. There are concerns that the IR Act may have a stifling effect on innovation. We’ll likely see further shifts in focus toward orphan diseases or personalized medicines, both areas in which therapies can extract comparably higher returns on investment, primarily due to higher pricing models.
Of course, while inflation should eventually level out, the popularity of AI and analytics will continue to skyrocket. The widespread proliferation of AI and analytics should speed up the overall development timeline, reduce operational costs, and abbreviate prototyping timeframes – all of which will bring new drugs to market faster – and potentially also help bring down manufacturing costs for existing drugs. The companies that embrace AI first and firmly will gain competitive advantages, making AI and analytics arguably the most prominent disruptor of the coming decade.
Read over 100 other views on the future of the pharma industry on our special web page.
