The Digital Transformation of American Pharma

In this video series, our Industries eXcellence experts invite you on a journey through time in order to highlight the diverse types of customers we work with and the massive technological changes that have shaped American manufacturing in the last century. In our second episode, Brandon Johnson, Associate Partner at Engineering Industries eXcellence, explores the past, present, digital transformation and future of the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.

Interested in speaking to one of our experts? Contact us at info@indx.com.

Full Transcript

Hi, my name is Brandon Johnson, and I'm an Associate Partner at Engineering Industries eXcellence. I've been working in the Life Sciences industry for over 10 years, helping guide our clients through every phase of their digitalization journey. I'm really proud of the work that Engineering Industries eXcellence does with pharmaceutical and other life science manufacturers, because it really highlights the social responsibility aspect of our work and the positive impact that our projects have on society.

If we look at advertisements, like television commercials from the 1950s, we are really shocked as modern consumers by what we see. These ads prove that this industry has not always been very focused on patient health. Many early medicines actually did much more harm than good. Cigarettes and other tobacco products, morphine, cocaine, heroin, opium – all of these were once marketed by pharmaceutical companies and doctors as medicine. Now, of course, we know that these are some of the most addictive and dangerous drugs on the planet.

Over the decades, as people started realizing the harm that these bad drugs were doing, organizations like the FDA stepped in, and today the production of pharmaceuticals is heavily regulated. This regulation has been really good in a lot of ways. Today, patient health is the number one priority of the pharmaceutical industry, which it always should have been. However, the complexity of these government regulations has created many new challenges for modern pharmaceutical manufacturers.

All of this quality controls slows everything down. New drugs take longer to be developed. Completed drugs take longer to get into the hands of patients, and new technologies are much slower to be adopted by the industry. The focus on quality control is expensive too, and it contributes to driving up costs, both for the manufacturers and for the patients. Luckily, we can help. Engineering partners with our clients to help solve their biggest manufacturing and regulatory issues.

One of our current clients in the pharmaceutical industry is a global manufacturer focused on saving and sustaining the lives of patients with rare diseases, like hemophilia and primary immunodeficiency, all around the globe. Engineering Industries eXcellence has partnered with this client over the last seven years to digitalize their manufacturing processes at facilities across North America and Europe, reducing the use of paper by up to 90%.

Digital manufacturing means that most quality checks happen in seconds, not hours. This speeds up production and means that higher quality medicine can be produced and delivered to patients with some of the most debilitating diseases all around the world. As companies like our clients start to see the benefits that technology can bring to their manufacturing processes, we expect adoption to accelerate across the pharmaceutical industry.

What will the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing look like? Just imagine…Virtual training of surgeons and medical students using powerful immersive simulation and augmented reality tools. Advanced genomics and personal medicine, an emerging treatment approach that takes into consideration lifestyle, individual genes, and environment for each patient. 3D printing of human organs and tissues. For example, a 3D printer that can print the human kidney in seven hours, or a 3D printer that can scan a wound and then print regenerative tissue directly on the patient. Technologies like these are already revolutionizing medicine, and none of them could have been imagined 25 years ago.

We all know that digitalization is transformative, and in no other industry does it have such power to positively impact the welfare of human lives than in pharmaceutical manufacturing. But new and complex technologies that advance medicine will also introduce new and complex challenges for manufacturers. Our team will be ready to meet these challenges and help shape the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing.