Navigating Risk in Life Sciences: Building Resilience to Support Growth

Life sciences companies need to develop strategies that places health equity at the heart of their business operations and extend across their organization, offerings, community, and ecosystem. The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the importance of digital advances as companies raced to meet the demand for new testing, vaccines, and treatments to combat the pandemic. With big changes such as Brexit and the advent of new technologies, there is much for UK life sciences to navigate in the coming years. Attendees from across life sciences and Alissa Dhaliwal from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) discussed the current conditions of the sector and what it means for projects. According to Dr. Chabi, the life sciences industry is poised to greatly benefit from this second phase of the AI revolution.

• To move past this, and to succeed in the post-pandemic world, life sciences R&D organizations need to focus on accelerating digital transformation programs, strategic shifts, and commercial reorganization.
• Her vision is for AI to complement human expertise in healthcare, rather than replace it, focusing on treatments that are specifically designed for each patient.
• Together, these technologies speed up the process of finding new medicines, making them less expensive and more efficient, which is great news for getting new treatments to people faster.
• By 2030, there will be increased legal oversight to ensure compliance and ethical use of tech.
• While headwinds such as patent expirations and policy pressures persist, the industry's adaptability, backed by robust investment and scientific progress, positions it well for sustainable long-term growth.

While there is great potential for AI to transform the life sciences industry, there are many risks and challenges that remain. “As AI continues to evolve within life sciences, ethical considerations, data privacy, and regulatory challenges need to be carefully addressed to ensure responsible and beneficial implementation of these technologies,” said Grant Thornton Life Sciences Global Leader David Dominguez. One of the factors attributed to the turnaround was better information for decisions, specifically better knowledge of disease biology or how to modulate it, leading to new ways to treat diseases and moving into diseases that lack effective therapies. By 2020, the same journal noted the start of change in the trend line within the prior decade. The authors noted that the cost of R&D for new drugs approved by the USFDA had risen exponentially for 60 years.

The life sciences industry is at the heart of improving our health, agriculture, and environment, and it's thriving. But now stakeholders need to act on the lessons learned to strengthen the collective ability to respond to or—better yet—proactively address the existing global health issues. Our series of annual reports on Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation has provided insights into the state of biopharma R&D since 2010. Historic global shifts, pharmaceutical reimbursement policies, and intensifying competition have led life sciences companies to adapt using dynamic pricing techniques where prices fluctuate based on real-time data such as customer demand. All while reducing costs, improving time-to-discovery and insight, and collecting data to improve manufacturing and supply chain operations. Cloud technologies and platforms enabled challenges in life sciences industry organizations to let their employees work remotely and collaborate,share data across third party networks, as well as run AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms.

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Advances in AI, machine learning, and genomics are leading to significant progress in drug discovery and personalized medicine. These are exciting times in the life sciences industry, thanks largely to digital acceleration. As we look to the future, the life sciences sector is set to continue evolving, playing a key role in how healthcare develops.

As our understanding of biological systems improves, biotechnology companies can utilize this knowledge to develop more effective medicines, enhance farming practices, and better care for our planet. These advances, especially with AI in cancer care, are paving the way for treatments that are highly specific to each person's health needs. Additionally, with thousands of clinical trials underway worldwide, we're witnessing a surge in therapies that target the cell and gene levels. Patients, meanwhile, gain from being able to closely track their health and enjoy more convenient online appointments. These technologies provide doctors with valuable data, enabling them to make more informed decisions, monitor a patient’s recovery remotely, and provide more tailored care.

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Wearables and smart tech are playing a big role in helping the life sciences industry adopt a more patient-centric approach, too. These tools can detect health issues early, offer tailored health advice, improve general well-being and help manage chronic conditions. In the past, doctors used general criteria like age and sex to determine treatment plans for patients. AI is also incredibly good at finding patterns in huge sets of data, which is vital for things like researching diseases, discovering new drugs, and predicting health issues before they happen. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the driving forces of the life sciences industry.

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According to a recent Deloitte survey, R&D innovation is one of the top actions that 91% of life sciences organizations plan to invest in during 2023 and almost half of them are optimistic about the sector’s outlook in the coming year. Since the pandemic, three-fourths of people around the world now have experience with at-home tests and companies are increasingly able to access, interpret, and act on the billions of patient data points. With volatility related to the global pandemic, shipping and logistics-related geopolitical turmoil, and four-decade high inflation, the global life sciences sector is witnessing a shift in perspective towards supply chains. The Deloitte Health Equity Institutes partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to develop the Global Health Equity Network (GHEN) to ensure health equity across businesses.

The second phase is the generative AI revolution currently occurring and it goes beyond pattern recognition to actual pattern completion9. “Companies have been mitigating the shortage by forging partnerships and increasing collaborations across both industry and academia to share expertise and data.” Dr. Chabi said. Consider AI to be a priority with planned projects, yet more than half (51%) say they do not have the right mix of skilled AI talent to progress their AI initiatives. Regulatory requirements regarding patient safety and ethical practices are stricter than ever for the life sciences industry and the implementation of AI technologies raises the stakes. “Once the biases are embedded in the algorithms and they are deployed, there can be significant consequences to patients.”

Even as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform other sectors, the life sciences industry has only recently begun to realize its full potential. We are here to support you and your senior leadership team to leverage the opportunities that will present themselves during this period of transformation and disruption. The pace of change in life sciences in 2022 is likely to be as rapid and as far reaching as in the previous 12 months. “Supply chain strategy and planning will be become increasingly important to enhance the robustness of supply chains while mitigating against rising costs.” The government is also providing incentives for pharmaceutical companies to build and expand their capacity. Schellion is seeing how companies are investing in technology as one way to address the global shortage of people and skills.