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Opinion
For all its bleakness, the Covid-19 pandemic showed what was possible when industries unite
POST-PANDEMIC LESSONS Authors: NOEL MAESTRE, PE, vice president of Life Sciences and DAVID ESTAPE, technology manager Biotechnology at CRB
Virus response rewrote the playbook for vaccine response, but even more change is necessary to deal with emerging threats. Across the world, governments and biopharma organisations are absorbing the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic. With much of the world now in endemic protocols – managing the virus, yet wary of variants potentially in wait -- there is an enormous amount to understand about what worked, and what didn’t, in the race to deliver effective life-saving vaccines and therapies. As we move toward virus management, we marvel about everything it took to get us here. New ways of accelerating from R&D to manufacturing. New models for partnership and collaboration. A whole new mindset, which casts off our industry’s conservative nature in favour of more innovation, more speed, and more flexibility with the goal of more lives saved. As the Omicron variant emerged in late 2021, CRB released its newest Horizons: Life Sciences report, built with an exhaustive survey of more than 500 industry leaders who answered nearly 80 questions. The resulting data revealed two intersecting trends which will define the post-pandemic era for our industry. First, the science of drug manufacturing: Clinical teams are developing novel therapies capable of preventing and curing diseases that, until now, have eluded effective treatment. We watched this happen in real time as the world’s first mRNA vaccines emerged last year, but it’s a shift long in the making; consider the scale of private investment in cell and gene therapy