Interview with Sonia Franck, Secretary-General of Innovative Medicines Luxembourg (IML), the association for the innovative pharmaceutical industry in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
IML represents the research-based pharmaceutical companies operating in Luxembourg and enjoys full membership of 61 companies, committed to researching, developing and bringing to patients new medicines that improve health and the quality of life.
What is your opinion about the potential impact of digitalization on the pharma industry?
I believe that the digital transformation will fundamentally shape the future of healthcare and change the way pharmaceutical companies do business from discovery to delivery. For instance, being able to use interoperable data and artificial intelligence (AI) will drive much of this change.
Innovation is crucial for our industry and the digitalization throughout the lifecycle of a medicine creates opportunities for pharma companies to increase value and ultimately stimulate lifelong health for all.
Can you talk a little bit more about those opportunities?
Digital technologies will further enhance the direction towards personalized medicines. Sensors and digital services will create additional value for treatments by providing tailored care around the clock. Digital tools will constantly monitor patient’s condition and provide feedback to the patient and caregivers and enable timely adjustments to the treatment.
The combinations of drug and digital components will help to improve the health outcomes of patients, making them the final beneficiary of both pharmaceutical and digital innovations. Medication itself will of course still be important. But the therapies will be more and more integrated healthcare solutions, more personalized and targeting the needs of each patient with greater precision than before.
Beyond the impacts on personalized healthcare, how else will digitalisation change the pharmaceutical industry?
For instance, the digital developments help pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and patients to engage in different ways of communication and conversation. Digital-engagement technologies open a new way to exchange information and help in recruiting patients for trials.
Patients use online patient communities to speak to other patients with the same disease and start using much more patient portals for their medical records. Those digital ways of communication have of course been accelerated during the covid pandemic leading to the first steps of virtual care.
Those new ways of interacting give companies, physicians, and patients more possibilities to derive value.
In Luxembourg, IML is part of the European Pharmaledger project, an Innovative Medicines consortium project that brings together 12 global pharmaceutical companies and 17 public and private entities, including technical, legal, academia, research, and patients’ representatives’ organizations. Within the Pharmaledger, IML is starting a Proof on Concept (PoC) on an Electronic Product Information (EPI) solution. It will allow anyone with a mobile phone to scan a medical box and receive important and approved product information, offering a searchable, sustainable, and secure alternative to paper leaflets that can be updated for accuracy in real time. This multi-language POC would be extended to adverse event reporting, adherence reminders, e-recruitment to clinical trial, clinical trial e-consent, Medical Device loT & Personalized Medicines and detecting falsified medicines. It’s a perfect example of a neutral, trusted, shared infrastructure for secure data exchange in healthcare.
Another big opportunity is to use data from the real world to derive better insights and improve regulatory and healthcare decision making. Healthcare data collected in the “real-world” (Real-World Data, RWD) outside the traditional randomized controlled trial environment can be used to generate evidence (Real World Evidence, RWE) that support better decision-making on safety, efficacy, and effectiveness in development of new therapies. RWD/RWE can expand on disease epidemiology, progression, and patient pathways, and help gain clarity on the safety and efficacy of novel therapies both in development and following marketing authorization, in which it has been already used for decades (e.g. pharmacovigilance).
In a world that is becoming more digital every day, the matter of data has been widely discussed in the business world. For our industry, the importance of health data is huge, however, care must be taken due to the sensitivity of this type of health data. There is still a long way to go to unlock the full potential of RWD but it is widely recognized already that its better use will benefit all partners of the data and health ecosystem: patients and society, healthcare providers and healthcare organizations, academia, and researchers as well as regulators and payers. Our common goal should be to learn from RWD for better evidence and health outcomes.
IML is part of EFPIA, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
