As the life sciences industry undergoes a massive transformation in terms of product development, computer and software companies are playing a major role in accelerating and helping them. And in turn, this has led to newer demands for better and more computing power and methods for aggregating, accessing, manipulating and analyzing data. \

So, what’s driving the interest of life science companies in IT? According to Bruce Carlson, Publisher of the Rockville, Maryland, US-based Kalorama Information the ultimate event that is driving life sciences transactions across the board—be it devices, hospital usage, nursing homes, pharmaceuticals, home healthcare—is the aging of the world population. “We are living longer, and so are people in most industrialized countries, and we require more healthcare.  With more need comes more transactions and existing systems won’t be able to handle.  The need to manufacture more drugs, complete more clinical trials and do them faster, shorten hospital stays, collect more bills,” says Carlson

According to Abhishek Dutta, Research Analyst, Technical Insights, Healthcare Practice, Frost & Sullivan, “The primary issue in the life sciences sector at present is the ease and comfort loving nature of the end-users.”

 Industry Challenges

Unlike other sectors, the life sciences industry is heavily regulated both for social and ethical issues and that was the reason the life sciences sector was slow on adopting IT.

Wise adoption and investment behind technologies is a major challenge because of the uncertainties in technology and market. Not all technologies are commercial success. The market has to be ready to adopt the technology. In healthcare, patients always demand new devices but when it comes to application, they mostly want to rely on cheaper, time proven and standardized conventional techniques for care. Thus, the new technologies need to be propagated by educating the mass to attain effective commercialization.

Moreover, the period required in commercializing a particular technology in the life sciences domain is often too long compared to the other industry verticals, thus affecting profitability. Vendor drug company loosing its IP after the stipulated period leads to emergence of generic drugs thus affecting profitability of the company and its projects.

The life science technology industry—like every other industry—requires software for automation, resource management, data management, interoperability within systems, encryption of data, prevent loss of data, dynamic and easy access to EMRs (digitized records) from anywhere in the world without the hassles of carrying the records on paper and others and hence the life sciences IT companies fulfill the market or industry demands.

The high cost of delivering healthcare to everyone is also creating technology needs. “If keeping things on paper can reduce time spent on transactions, you’ve got a drive for electronic health records software.  If I can wand a patient who’s bracelet has a RIFD tag and thus know they’ve been X-rayed and rather than having a folder that travels with the patient and doesn’t’ get to the billing office, you have information that gets to billing at light speed, you’ve saved labor and money and perhaps even captured reimbursement that would have been lost,” says Carlson.

 Proper standardization of technology

1. Biotech Industry: Standardized and integrated process automation in plants as well as in labs.

2. Pharma: Standardized and integrated process automation in plants for batch processing of tablets etc.

3. Medical Devices: Standardization of protected wireless modality to be used for wireless communication.

 Why Now?

Carlson says there are enormous demands being placed on the life sciences industry because of advancements in scientific knowledge, new pharmaceutical discoveries, and the aging of the world population especially in the industrialized nations.  Many of these problems will never be solved without the aid of technology.

 Most large hospitals have or are looking into some type of automation consisting of robotic specimen handling, analyzing and storage and of course computers and software to run and measure those systems, and this is what enabling them to make their targets.  “If you run 4,000 tests a day, as some are, you can’t do that by hand anymore,” Carlson adds.

 Dutta of Frost & Sullivan says the world of IT and Communications is bringing about a new era in the life sciences industry. The main impact of IT and Communication technologies are: integration and interoperability, dynamic and speedy care and advanced biosignal processing.

 “Concepts such as Clinical Information Systems integrated with World Wide Web, remote patient monitoring using advanced wireless techniques as well as PSTN lines, maintaining database of clinical information (bio-signals, images and others), adaptive diagnostic processing of these clinical data and feeding this diagnostic information to clinicians makes the patient hope and demand for more and better care. Further, maintaining database of clinical data for generations will also aid in predicting diseases or at least risk of congenital diseases through genetic engineering,” Dutta adds.

 Although the life sciences industry is heavily regulated, IT companies see gold mine in it much the same way as they saw money in the financial sector after the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “It may be that the regulated nature of life sciences could drive technology growth. For example, in the US, the HIPPA law requires protections for privacy of medical records.  While electronic records are not mandated, paper records are simply insufficient to meet the privacy requirements of the law,” says Carlson.  “If you establish an electronic health record (EHR) system, you also have the opportunity to make a digital pharmacy or digital radiography and even some decision-helping tools into that software.  The US is the most pressing regulation driving technology, but other countries may follow the US example.”

Also in an industry where government, most likely, is the payer for R&D, companies have to be more productive. According to Carlson, if you can get costs under the reimbursement level, the more profit you make. That’s not just true in the US certainly, with medicare payments but it’s also true in China, where in clinical labs they are increasingly being compensated on their production levels.  Technology is the only way to speed things up and collect more income. 

According to Carlson, life sciences companies have been late adopters as it has most of the time been a very local industry.  There’s less pooled resources, less capital to make technology investments.  In other industries, a CEO can make change happen across many countries. 

To take a different tact, in biotechnology and diagnostics, there are some genetic and molecular tests that cannot be performed by human hands and human eyes.  Some genetic tests, for example, must be read by a computer.  “So there has to be computer and allied software in the lab, whether or not you like it. The same is true in biopharma manufacturing also.  Computers cannot be left out of the process of making these sensitive materials,” Carlson says. 

Growing Data: Industry to the rescue

As with any industry, huge amounts of data are being generated everyday in the life sciences industry. Data will definitely eat up a huge amount of digital space but this stored information, especially clinical results maintained in database for generations will aid the bioinformatics companies in detecting hereditary clues to disease risk of patients in future. Thus, clinical data for generations will aid in predicting diseases or at least risk of congenital diseases through data mining and correlation, and provide a platform for genetic engineering.

Now that the life sciences industry is as dependant on the IT, there will be some impact. Life sciences IT companies had entered the market along with the other IT companies focusing on other industry verticals. But, since life science industry is a conservative industry, when compared to industries such as mobile communications, commercial application and IT penetration in this industry took more time than in other industries. “Thus, we see that it is not that technology has entered late, but rather adoption of the technology by the industry has taken considerable amount of time leading to late market recognition of healthcare and life sciences IT companies,” Dutta quips.

It’s good that the IT companies have penetrated the life sciences market late compared to the insurance and finance industry, because the whole industry has learned from past mistakes and with life sciences being a crucial sector, being late is always better.

Trends and Future

If the trends of the last five years to be believed, most of the dollars has gone into: 1. Better Front-end developments, 2. Scalable Systems, 3. Interoperable Systems, 4. Electronic Medical Record Database, 5. Centrally (hospitals) integrated system architecture with local interface, 6. Data sharing leading to faster analysis, 7. Advanced biosignal-processing algorithms for better diagnosis such as HRV (Heart Rate Variability) analysis.

According to a latest Frost & Sullivan study, life sciences companies also spent on Bioinformatic algorithms for data mining, correlation and mapping, advanced software image visualization tools, software for advanced microscopy systems, tools for biosignal-processing and tools for image modifications and post processing and others.

Carlson says more money will flow into clinical trials, clinical discovery, life science manufacturing, pre-clinical, research & development technology. In clinical practice, EHR and wireless handhelds for nurse and physician input will be a norm, along with RFID wands requiring no hand input.  In research and development, the high-tech automation tools needed to increase.  Pharmaceutical manufacturing will always have a place for technology but one of the major areas is RFID used in various stages to monitor where the highly valuable product is.  Research and development will witness the greatest investment in lab automation and high throughput screening technologies, all of which require dedicated computer systems.  Medical devices aren’t just catheters anymore.  They have sensors and semiconductors in them now and sometimes video cameras.  Kalorama Information estimates a $5.92 billion market for the electronic and advanced components of medical devices.

Clustered server networks will play an important role in the life sciences industry, as the volume of clinical information rises and the need arises for a large volume of information to be hereditarily stored in the form of pedigree charts. Information at the back-end needs to be stored, managed, and archived in an efficient manner while providing users with the freedom of secure access to information.

Wi-Fi and 3G communication modes would be of much use in the life sciences domain. Wireless networking or rather wireless Internet will allow users easy accessibility to the online site from which data can be viewed or downloaded at ease. Similarly, 3G and similar types of mobile telephony or communication modes (such as EDGE or Blackberry) will facilitate easy clinical information transfer. This information may be voice based, written records, or even image type in nature. Maintenance of online security while information transfer occurs is a big issue in the life sciences domain.

Although life sciences industry is betting only now on the power of IT, there will be a time when IT will completely drive innovation in the life sciences segment. Nobody could have imagined a decade back that a supercomputer will be used for drug discovery but that’s given today. So life sciences will one day be the backbone of IT industry and vice versa.