CIOInsider India Magazine

Probably, “Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.” - Karl Marx is the apt quote for the pharmaceutical industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stats suggest that the Indian life sciences industry witnessed uniform growth for the last three decades, which still holds the market. Post 1990s liberalization, the Indian life sciences companies started venturing on the manufacturing of new products and patents' filing. Following this, there was success in the foreign lands for the Indian pharmaceutical industry. The supplies of vaccines from the Indian pharmacy market is about 50 percent of the global demands. India also supplies 40 percent of the United States’ generic demand, and the United Kingdom’s 25 percent of all the medicine requirement. In FY20, the Indian pharmaceutical exports resided at USD 6.7 billion.

Let’s Look Into The Trends Supporting This Growth

1. Leading to Personalized Medicine – The research institutes of life sciences are growing their verticals as scientists are discovering that some conditions are instilled in humans with genetic coding. This implicates that healthcare could be made customized through DNA information or genome features, dawning the new era of personalization medicines and healthcare functionalities.

2. Innovation By Collaboration of a Plethora of Life Sciences’ Companies – Always an evolving industry, life sciences industry in 2020 can witness joining of biotech companies and corresponding healthcare sciences centers for removing the limitation of development. Last year on May, four companies – Arzeda, Twist Bioscience, Labcyte, and TeselaGen partnered out for making a state-of-the-art assembly platform for human DNA.

This is done to make food items like sweeteners and other industrial products. And as hoped, the requirement of harvesting or mining supplies as DNA will be done in laboratories.

3. Drug Research Development – Improvement in drug research is taking place with smart technology allowing the flow of improvement in assessment and treatment of patients using medication. Addition of technology like MRI scans, laboratory apparatus, and in-patient monitors and management tools are facilitating the improvement. This will allow doctors to combine data needed to prescribe the perfect medication for a patient accurately.

4. Growth in Life Sciences Research – Scientists are engrossed now in particular branches of life sciences like immunotherapy, precision surgery and genetics. Precision surgery is rising as robotics studies are finding ways for betterment of surgical methods. Surgeons now are able to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence for performing mistake-free operations. AI is also providing insight to doctors on the course of a treatment.

5. Digital Assessment, Diagnosis, and Patient Treatment – Rise of digital transformation a few years back, giving smooth path to consumers and enhancing the marketing strategies of companies. This year, increasing digitalization in the life science industry via online assessment, diagnosis, and patient treatment is predicted. Doctors and healthcare professionals are continuing this practice virtually. General physicians are able to prescribe medications through data-based websites like LiveHealth Online, Teladoc, and Telepractice.

6. Managing Data – The nascent stages of data management proved to be difficult for data analysts to accumulate, place, and extract information related to life sciences research and system operations. Cloud management innovation enabled data management professionals to perform the same easily.

7. Enhancement of Drug Arrival Timeline – Important medications are in halt as approval from FDA takes long time. With advancement in technology, the government sector will improve the timeline of drug testing and conducting controlled trials for candidate patients.

8. Combining Genetics in Treatment – Increase in combining genetics info for the assessment and disorder treatment through gene technology will give researchers the platform to find genome sequences and predict disorders in humans and animals. Presently, experiments on gene editing is taking place which could lead to prevention of diseases and other inherited conditions passed from a mother to child.

9. Emphasizing on Immune Cell Function – An important and interesting aspect of life science is Immunity. Immunity is responsible for prevention of diseases directing to graving epidemics. Therefore, immune cell function is relied upon. Scientists are enthralled to finding how cells’ mechanism works on particular viruses and bacteria. Studies conducted will have major findings for immunotherapy and recent studies show that immune cells get a major portion of their characteristics through mitochondria.

Stated above are a few studies in life science industry and yet more path to be traversed.