Innovation and access to drugs and therapies

Improving healthcare and enabling new treatments through measurement

We need new drugs and therapies, with better efficacy and clinical performance. They need to reach the marketplace faster, at lower cost and in line with regulation. At the same time, the move towards personalised medicine has great potential in delivering improved patient outcomes.

New financial, research and regulatory models for drug discovery and development aim to encourage investment in areas of critical need, such as pandemic preparedness and antimicrobial resistance. To take full advantage of emerging opportunities, through the development of innovative new therapeutic approaches the healthcare industry faces many challenges, including:

• the need to reduce expensive late stage failure rates (drug attrition) through techniques that reduce uncertainty and increase the information from pre-clinical safety assessment
• integration of 'omics' technologies and systems biology to provide simulations and predictions that are based upon reliable data
• better quantitative understanding of biological systems and related processes and the application of engineering biology approaches and systems to enable scale-down, scale-up and scale-out of products

• improvements in manufacture, delivery, analysis and quality control of complex medicines, advanced therapies and bioproducts (including point of care manufacture). This includes the application of adaptive manufacturing and the establishment of Pharma 4.0, the digitisation of medicines manufacture.