Summary
Struck by successive waves of the pandemic, the Life Sciences industry was forced to refocus its digital transformation strategies in order to deliver frontline treatments to patients, as senior executives report.
Now, faced with new emerging threats – from supply chain disruption to the global economic slowdown – the focus of digital transformation is on improving productivity, reducing costs and driving scientific innovation across the entire R&D value chain.
Despite these admirable intentions, this report suggests that inadequate data strategies continue to undermine ambitions for digital transformation in Life Sciences. Missing files, siloed and inaccessible data, and compromises to the integrity of clinical trial records ultimately stand to obstruct endeavours to improve human health.
It will be interesting to see over the coming years how Life Sciences organisations adapt to these new challenges, and evolve and mature their digital transformation strategy and approach.
Leslie Galloway, Chairman of the industry association the Ethical Medicines Industry Group (EMIG), commented on the report:
“The majority of digital transformation strategies now focus on improving productivity through streamlining processes while reducing costs. But a digital transformation strategy can and should transcend business concerns: it has the potential to drive human progress and change global health.
For instance, astute interrogation of historical data proved crucial to the ground-breaking TOGETHER trial. This was the first trial to demonstrate that a low-cost repurposed medicine (fluvoxamine) could prevent hospitalisations for COVID-19. It evaluated nine different interventions and managed to eliminate six of them as ineffective at a very early stage, thereby saving both time and money. This only proved possible because researchers were able to access existing clinical data. A data strategy should be at the heart of any digital transformation strategy if we are to continue to drive economic growth in this important industry sector.”
'...a digital transformation strategy can and should transcend business concerns: it has the potential to drive human progress and change global health.'
Chris Sigley
CEO, Arkivum
Chris Sigley, Arkivum CEO:
“The future of medicine lies in maintaining wellness – prevention, early detection, effective treatments, and even cures for conditions and diseases that stop us from leading long and healthy lives. This future cannot be achieved without confident data management strategies.
Whatever the objective of your strategy – interrogating data on a large scale to recruit suitable patients for clinical trials, gaining data insights to support the repurposing of drugs, or regulatory reporting – clinical data has to be stored and preserved in a way that ensures it remains FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable.
Today, if you ask senior commercial executives in Life Sciences about their strategies for preserving digital clinical data, three out of four would describe their organisation’s ability to access clinical data, files and records as ‘good’. By contrast, seven in ten specialists in clinical research would describe it as ‘extremely inadequate’ or ‘very inadequate’.
By no means does digital preservation of clinical data – even at a petabyte scale – have to be prohibitively expensive. It must, however, be done properly.
The archiving and preservation of clinical data is not merely an end process. Digital preservation needs to rise up the board agenda and to become ingrained in the psyche of Life Sciences if the industry is to maximise its capacity to improve human health.”