Top Five (New?) Trends For Pharma 2020

TOP FIVE (NEW?) TRENDS FOR PHARMA 2020 Erik Halvorsen

Introduction The pharmaceutical industry is growing at a steadily rising rate. It is expected to be worth about $1.1 trillion by 2021. There are over 2000 compounds in late stage clinical development and over 200 new products projected to be approved in the next couple years—a level of production that has not been seen in over a decade.

There are a number of key trends within the pharmaceutical industry that are familiar and still driving the field like rising healthcare costs, the need for lower cost drugs, heavy focus on oncology and significant M&A activity and collaborations to fill pipelines. But there are a few newer trends that will be interesting to watch and see what their long-term impact on the pharma industry will be.

ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE The role of AI is expected to grow into new areas for pharma including matching and recruiting patients to clinical trials, improving medication adherence and detecting medication abuse. The future of AI for the pharma industry is here to stay but companies will have to sort through the noise of all these upstart AI companies and apps.

EXPLOITATION OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA’S POTENTIAL The perceived potential of medical marijuana and the broad cannabidiol (CBD) medication industry is expected to gain more acceptance in the U.S. and countries that had previously restricted its use. Already approved for medical use in 33 states and a number of states recreationally that number is only expected to creep upwards.

PROLIFERATION OF BLOCKCHAIN Pharmaceutical companies are expected to integrate their data through the crypto-concept, thereby enabling faster data sharing and data processing across the organization. It will also allow for increased transparency and secure transactions of data with key strategic partners like hospitals, payers and government regulators. This should allow the pharmaceutical sector to achieve increased operational efficiency, saving time and cutting on costs on R&D.

Cost Regulations & Value Based Approvals The governments in various countries are expected to play an active role in helping regulate the cost of medication to help bring down the overall cost of acquisition of medical services. Huge discrepancies in costs to consumers for the same drug depending on whether it is bought in Canada, the US or EU are generating a lot of valid concerns about cost and access that must be addressed.

Value-based medication approval is rapidly becoming a reality as new medicines must not only show improved outcomes but cost effectiveness as well. If a new drug is only marginally better than a generic, it will find a hard time getting approval, gaining market share and maintaining a premium price point that newly approved drugs have been used to. The emergence of exciting gene therapy and gene editing treatments will come with a VERY high price tag.

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE AND STEM CELL THERAPY

Through mergers and expanding R&D pipelines and capabilities, most of the big pharma companies have therapeutics across a variety of modalities. With the recent exception of Vertex’s acquisition of Semma Therapeutics, the one area most pharma have yet to venture into is the stem cell and regenerative medicine space. Ever since the discovery of embryonic stem cells in the early 2000’s and then the socalled “adult stem cells” and progenitor cells that we possess in all of our tissues with the potential to regenerate and differentiate into new healthy tissue, the promise of “regenerative medicine” and using our own body to heal itself has been exciting.

These are a few of the trends in the pharma industry for 2020 from where I sit—what are you seeing?

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