The recipe for accelerated pharma innovation
The pharmaceutical and life sciences industries have come a long way since the herbal remedies of the Middle Ages and the breakthrough drug discoveries of the 19th century. Today’s modern pharmaceutical companies operate at the cutting edge of science, yet they still face one major hurdle: time. Getting a drug from the lab to a patient can take up to a decade or even longer. That timeline isn’t just costly for businesses; it also delays critical care for the people who need it most.
But there’s a solution. By creating a fully connected and digitalized value chain, one where data moves seamlessly and decisions can be made faster, pharma leaders can dramatically accelerate development, reduce costs, and ultimately get life-saving treatments to patients sooner.
Connecting data with digital threads
In an industry where delays can cost up to $1.5 million per day, efficiency alone isn’t enough. Pharmaceutical companies need speed, resilience, and flexibility without ever compromising on safety or quality. The key lies in combining the real and digital worlds to become a sustainable Digital Enterprise.
Digital Threads provide the blueprint. Think of them as a city subway map, with yellow, blue and red lines guiding the fastest route from point A to point B. That’s exactly what Digital Threads do for pharma. They help steer organizations through digital transformation, enabling them to make intelligent, data-driven decisions at every stage of the drug development lifecycle.
Digital Threads also facilitate knowledge and tech transfer from the lab to pilot, to industrial scale and ultimately to commercial manufacturing. That means lab scientists can experiment freely while the systems around them track and retain every data point for future use, ensuring no insight gets lost along the way.
Accelerated design and development
In pharma, speed can save lives but only if it comes with accuracy. Today, many companies rely on physical experiments to develop new medicines. While effective, these processes are time-consuming, costly and prone to error.
Fortunately, simulation offers a solution.
Simulating Drug Therapies
With a comprehensive Digital Twin, scientists can now design and simulate drug formulations at the molecular level. They can evaluate particle size, tablet composition and ensure the compound remains stable in the human body. All without the time and expense of physical trials.
Simulation also extends to drug delivery methods. Whether a treatment is best delivered via a pill, inhaler or capsule can be tested virtually. This capability is especially powerful for serving smaller, more targeted patient groups which enables pharma companies to quickly identify the best treatment delivery method for unique needs.
Simulating Drug Development with AI
Simulation doesn’t stop at the drug itself. Scientists and engineers can now simulate the entire manufacturing process from lab scale to industrial scale. By virtually balancing key parameters like temperature, volume and mixing speed, manufacturers can skip thousands of physical tests.
Additionally, by using graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of traditional CPUs, companies can simulate hundreds of experiments per hour, drastically cutting development time.
Add in artificial intelligence, and the process gets even faster. AI learns iteratively from past simulations, allowing researchers to avoid starting from scratch every time. The result? Faster, smarter and more accurate development cycles.
Companies already using these technologies have reported impressive results including:
- 30% reduction in raw material consumption
- 50% faster time to market
- 70% decrease in energy consumption using GPUs instead of CPUs
All these advancements mean that pharmaceutical companies can bring cutting-edge therapies to patients faster than ever before.
The traditional pharma development cycle is too long, too costly and too rigid for today’s urgent healthcare challenges. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By becoming a sustainable Digital Enterprise, companies can leverage Digital Threads, simulation and AI, pharmaceutical to drastically shorten time to market, streamline decision-making and reduce resource consumption while maintaining the highest standards.
To learn more about Siemens’ innovations in pharma and life science, visit our website.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
