What is the future of the pharmaceutical industry?

Technology will be a major catalyst for the future of pharmaceutical industry. Digitization & consolidation will be key. We will see more companies working together in research and development, and even in manufacturing. The availability of more data will bring further automation and digitization of supply chains and patient interactions. Collaboration is certain, as it is a need in order to avoid high production costs and low efficiency inherited from conventional methods of drug production.

Research and development will evolve from its current set up into a network of decentralized companies, working together with technology companies, startups, and scientific institutes, using shared technology platforms, harvesting economy of scale, and accelerating innovation for patients, while maintaining entrepreneurial focus on individual companies.

Consumer engagement will evolve with our patients by enabling them to be more informed and empowered to participate in treatment decision making; in turn, that may mean we will have better health outcomes.

Personalized healthcare will be the standard in the near future. Instead of making medicines for diseases, medicines will be for individual patients, taking into consideration their specific needs. The growth of pharmacogenomics will be a critical need since there are more than fifty million DNA variations that we need to better understand!

Three main set of skills are critical for the leaders working in the future pharmaceutical industry: one, comfort with change and continuous learning; two, critical thinking and decision making skills; three, advanced data analysis; thus, in the coming four to five years, twenty five percent of the jobs we know today will change!

Abraham Lincoln once said "The best way to predict the future is to create it !".The future of pharmaceutical industry has started already with the focus on personalized healthcare ,digitization and developing our skills to cope with unprecedented rate of change in our world. The focus on the evolving needs of our patients remains the main source of evolution.