Amid the rapid global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, three key trends for the biopharmaceutical industry have come into focus:

• Emerging therapeutic modalities
• Increased sophistication in using data
• A greater degree of crossover and collaboration between industry and academia

Michael Parker, MD, of Harvard Medical School (HMS), foresaw the importance of these themes and developed HMX Pro courses that are perfectly positioned to meet the needs of companies keeping up in a rapidly changing landscape. As associate dean for Online Learning Research and faculty director of HMX at HMS, Dr. Parker has the pulse of industry trends and key industry players — and a growing list of companies and quantitative insights to prove the value of meeting these changes head-on.

“These things were already happening; they were just tremendously accelerated during COVID-19,” says Dr. Parker. “We saw an increased facility to work with data [about coronavirus]—to share it and to analyze it; greater openness to collaborating across traditional boundaries; and an increased desire to learn about clinical trials and to understand newer modalities like mRNA.” 

These three key trends will be emblematic of therapeutics development going forward, Dr. Parker says, with the most successful businesses investing in a sustained commitment to continued education. To that end, biopharmaceutical companies looking for a competitive edge when it comes to emerging modalities, increased use of data, and industry-academic collaboration should start by engaging in ongoing learning.

Here is a closer look at the industry’s future:

Emerging Modalities

Scientists are quite familiar with small molecule drugs and biologics, but cell-based therapies, gene therapies, and nucleic-acid based therapies have gained widespread attention more recently. For example, take mRNA vaccines, which have risen in prominence (to the point of now being common parlance) due to the coronavirus vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer.

“These therapeutics and technologies are expanding the tool chest of what people have to apply to disease,” says Dr. Parker. “It’s an incredibly exciting and rapidly moving field. I think emerging modalities will be amazingly transformative in the next five or ten years.”

One example of this transformation is Landmark Bio, a new center for developments in gene therapy, stem cell science, regenerative medicine, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, and cancer immunotherapy, among other advances. This project is led by Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other organizations and hospitals. The center aims to remove the barriers in drug development, overcome bottlenecks, and foster collaboration to manufacture a new generation of medicines. 

Landmark Bio’s efforts to foster cross-sector teamwork and improve scalable manufacturing processes provide a good model for how innovations in the life sciences can become a reality. Not only will the technologies themselves progress but so will the process to bring about “tomorrow’s breakthrough therapies,” as the center’s website states.

Increased Use and Reliance on Data

The second trend is the increased use of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, which Dr. Parker expects to see infused into all areas of health care and life science innovation. This includes the identification of people that a drug would most likely help, better statistical analyses of clinical trial results and real-world evidence, and evaluation of radiology and pathology images, genomics, and other data, using AI to screen for cancer or spot its progression.  

Such uses of data will provide new tools to clinicians and researchers so they can better maximize the success of drugs, make clinical trials more efficient, and reduce time spent previewing scans or slides so patients have answers more quickly and physicians can dedicate more energy to research and patient care.

Over time, these technologies will also help personalize health care for individual patients.

“Basically, one broad goal is to figure out what treatments and diagnostics are best for which patients and move toward precision health care,” he says. 

That means using AI and machine learning to determine which patients are good candidates for a certain medicine, target a patient’s biology and continually track a person’s condition outside the clinic. Additionally, data will further improve the interpretation of diagnostic tests and understanding of biomarkers, which will help providers better identify signals of the emergence or mitigation of disease. 

Advancements for clinicians also benefit other aspects of the life sciences industry. Streamlining patient care with the help of data has ripple effects, such as improving the clinical data available to researchers and businesses, decreasing costs, increasing investment in other health-improving technologies, and improving patient outcomes.

Before long, many health care and life sciences industry roles, not just those who explicitly work with artificial intelligence, will benefit from comfort with and understanding data.

“I would call this a democratization of data,” says Dr. Parker, “which essentially means that within an organization, there is an increasing range of roles that are being empowered to ask questions of the data and to work with the data to gain insights.”

Reimagining Industry-Academic Collaboration

Over the course of his time in medicine, Dr. Parker has seen the relationship between the life sciences industry and academia change. He remembers when it was more common for academics to make discoveries and pass off those findings to industry, where they would then be developed and taken to market. Now, industry and academia often collaborate throughout the process, from discovery to development to distribution.

“[The partition] has blurred tremendously, with good effect, to try and accelerate the whole process,” he says.

Especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Parker has witnessed enhanced teamwork and a more rapid interchange of knowledge, pivotal to the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. To that end, HMS founded the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), a multi-institutional group of academics and health care industry professionals that aims to create a rapid-response system to address future health crises.

“I’ve seen a mutual respect and understanding that people are highly motivated in academia and industry to foster advances that will benefit patients,” says Dr. Parker. “That is a positive trend. No single entity can do it by itself.”

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As the associate dean for Online Learning Research and faculty director of HMX at HMS, Dr. Parker helps develop and deliver courses designed for corporate teams and individuals seeking to address these trends head-on through new perspectives or deepened understanding. These courses bring together the insights and expertise of faculty members at HMS and across the university. Learn more about HMX here. For additional thoughts from Dr. Parker, read this recent article on the importance of medical science knowledge for all health care business professionals, regardless of role.