The Phuture of Pharma

What does the future hold for the Pharmaceutical Industry? Perhaps it could be a pill that’s linked to your smartphone?  Mene Pangalos, from AstraZeneca, explains where he sees his industry heading in the future...

Mene - Technology is going to have a huge impact in our future, and one of the things that we have been thinking about is what’s next in terms of the things that will continue to improve our productivity. I think technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence will help us in our laboratories in terms of how we optimise molecules, how we understand interactions of pathways in the cell. I think there’s going to be a huge influx of genomic data that will help us stratify disease into subsets that are going to be more amenable to drug discovery.

Then, when you look at how people use their mobile phones and their devices, you think about how you tie a medicine, to a device, to an illness where you can improve adherence to the medicine where you can improve behaviours to the illness as well as how you respond to the therapy. I think you’ll see devices becoming much more intertwined with our medicines in a way that improves both their outcome, but also adherence.