Janifha Evangeline | Friday, 19 August 2022
Emerging technologies have huge potential to transform how the pharma industry operates today.
Cloud Computing is one such major technology which has transformed the way the pharma industry operates. However, the utilization of new & advanced technologies is conventionally slow for pharma firms owing to strict regulation & various other compliance issues. But fortunately, the pandemic has been a wake-up call for this sector for rethinking its operations.
With the cloud-based technologies providing the enterprises the ability to access greater resources & processing scale, the cloud’s greatest potential benefit to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is in its scalability. This could be a huge enabler for AI strategies, that include drug discovery. However, a few of the experts warn that cloud will not by default decrease costs & security concerns remain a huge roadblock to IT departments that are looking at cloud-based innovations.
"There is a huge opportunity for pharma, as well as in the medical technology and life sciences industries, to use the cloud to help with curing diseases, but that concern for privacy slows down the data sharing," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. With an aim to decrease costs & streamline their workloads as they have begun to realize the true potential of digital technologies The pharma industry is leveraging the power of advanced technologies to a greater extent.
Since cloud adoption has transformed and has started addressing privacy, security, as well as compliance challenges that the industry is facing, at present, cloud computing is no more a solution that is used to meet only the storage requirements in the pharmaceutical industry. Let us look at some of the ways in which cloud computing is driving the pharma industry towards innovation and efficiency.
Accelerating the drug discovery process While the R&D of a drug can span over numerous years, cloud-based high-performance computing will enable the researchers to access virtually unlimited storage as well as computing resources which can facilitate in organizing resources & guide initial surveys. With the help of cloud-based infrastructure, data, that include the lab, imagery, as well as statistical analysis data, can be delivered at speed and this helps in saving time during the early R&D phases.
This technology is combined with an aim to augment the commercial results & save costs. These productivity savings, along with the operational savings could be invested into the Research & Development efforts and therefore, cloud computing in the pharma sectors enables speed up the drug discovery process.
Moderna’s mRNA platform leverages cloud-based computational capacity for running different algorithms and design each mRNA sequence.
Enabling seamless collaboration While the pandemic made various industries understand the significance of the globalization of healthcare, pharmaceutical organizations collaborate & work with a range of partners consisting of biotech firms as well as research enterprises that are located anywhere on the planet.
This is where cloud computing comes to your aid. With cloud computing in the pharma sector, there is a huge scope of integrating and standardizing these information flows to build a efficient, streamlined collaboration platform. Not just that, this technology also renders pharma enterprises with greater control over their scalability potential and they can often collaborate with other firms to discover & develop new drugs. In such cases, while keeping their independent data safe and secure, the cloud can enable firms come together in order to share a common platform. Hence, cloud computing in the pharmaceutical sector facilitates a quick, efficient as well as secure way for delivering the value of their work.
Secure data sharing during clinical trials Clinical trials & clinical research are changing from a paper-driven model to something which is almost completely electronic. At present, smartphone technology & wearables are facilitating researchers to gather data straight from clinical research trial participants. However, despite possessing this advanced model for collecting data & a high-speed computer for computing this data, clinical trials will still take a lot of time.
This happens since clinical trials produce a huge amount of data which often go underutilized owing to hurdles which prevent data sharing that comprise data misinterpretation & risking patient privacy. The perfect solution for this is to get critical trial management into the cloud computing infrastructure since possessing a single centralized “console” in the cloud from which to query, receive & archive feedback to a great extent accelerates the clinical trial process. Besides it also facilitates researchers to aggregate clinical data & analyze them at the granular level. Therefore, cloud computing in the pharmaceutical sector for clinical trials makes sure that professional-grade security & discretion of valuable collaborative input.
CloudCodes offers continuous security assessment of AWS Workload which is based on CIS benchmarks. It is an easy and simple way for monitoring numerous aspects of the AWS work load getting noticed.
The road ahead The key driver of today’s multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry is the constant & persistent innovation. The cloud computing market for the pharmaceutical sector is anticipated to go through rapid growth as regulatory issues are ironed out & security fears settle down along with the digitalization accelerated by the pandemic. Furthermore, to withstand the demands of future the pharmaceutical industry has to adopt digital technologies that include cloud computing, AI, Big data analytics, and Internet of Things.
