1. Digital Components Drive New Pharmaceutical Value

Jaydev Thakkar, Chief Operating Officer of Biofourmis — a provider of AI‑powered digital therapeutics and home‑care solutions — predicts that by 2022, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies will recognize how digital components can substantially improve patient outcomes for their products.

“This digital component may be a regulatory‑approved therapy paired with a drug that treats or helps manage a disease. It can also be a virtual‑care element designed to boost patient engagement and experience throughout disease management,” Thakkar stated.

Digital companion tools can capture meaningful real‑world data on drug efficacy, safety, adherence and patient engagement. As more pharmaceutical firms acknowledge this reality, “these tools will also become critical for developing value‑based contracts with payers,” Thakkar noted. “We expect more pharmaceutical companies to launch new medicines alongside such evidence‑based digital therapeutics, or introduce virtual‑care elements to complement previously released drugs still under patent protection.”

2. Dawn of Adaptive Clinical‑Trial Designs

The pandemic has reshaped how biopharma addresses complex patient needs in clinical research.

“Because of these shifts, patients wishing to enroll in many clinical trials are no longer confined to a single site,” said Tom Lemberg, Founder and CEO of Curebase, developer of a decentralized clinical‑trial software platform. “Patients lead diverse lifestyles; study designs that fail to accommodate patient needs cannot recruit participants effectively.”

Traditional clinical trials often place heavy burdens on patients. “It is not uncommon for trials to require repeated visits to the same clinical‑trial site, even for conditions experienced by a broad patient population,” Lemberg explained.

Today, a rising number of studies offer far greater flexibility in how patients may participate. “Options for participation conducted virtually at home, at local pharmacies or with patients’ own physicians represent an effective approach to successful patient recruitment,” Lemberg said.

“As we move into 2022, I anticipate adaptive trial designs will offer patients an expanding array of ways to take part in research from home or amid busy, globally mobile lifestyles,” he added. “Biopharma companies must meet these patients’ needs to accelerate studies and recruit target populations.”

3. Evolving Data Science in Drug Discovery and Development

2021 marked a pivotal year for the pharmaceutical industry’s adoption of data science for drug discovery and development. Jane Z. Reed, Director of Life Sciences at Linguamatics (IQVIA), expects this trend to persist.

“If companies wait for enterprise‑wide solutions to be built, they risk missing market opportunities. Accordingly, data scientists are turning to cloud‑first tools that can plug quickly and easily into existing workflows without full‑scale enterprise deployment,” Reed observed. “Agile tools that work alongside established processes are required to generate actionable insights.”

Growing industry interest in pharmaceutical data science includes natural‑language processing (NLP), which helps “data scientists automate and accelerate workflows for unstructured text more rapidly and efficiently to yield insights that inform drug‑development processes,” Reed said.

4. Pharma Invests in Pharmacogenomics

Genetic mutations play a major role in many diseases. Yet of the roughly 20 000 FDA‑approved drugs, fewer than 200 include genetic‑mutation‑related indications and usage information.

“By 2022, life‑science researchers will ramp up investment in pharmacogenomics,” stated Jim Robbins, Senior Vice‑President at Arcadia Life Sciences, a healthcare data and software firm.

“This investment will focus on two key areas: the collection of genomic datasets from genetically diverse populations, and linking these datasets to deep phenotypic data including claims records, structured EHRs, NLP‑derived unstructured EHR content, laboratory results and wearable‑device data,” he explained.

Robbins expects the resulting genotypic‑phenotypic datasets to accelerate pharmacogenomic discoveries. Pharmacogenomics will thereby “reshape the current disease‑specific drug‑approval paradigm toward mutation‑specific indications and usage approvals,” he commented.

5. Digital Therapeutics Gain Traction

Aniket Singh Rajput, Founder and CEO of Neuroglee Therapeutics, forecasts that adoption of digital therapeutics (DTx) will accelerate in 2022 for high‑unmet‑need conditions, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“The drug‑development pipeline for Alzheimer’s features more than one hundred candidates, yet not every patient qualifies for each agent. Many deliver only modest impacts on patients’ cognition, behaviour and other symptoms,” said Rajput, whose firm builds personalized prescription‑digital‑therapy and virtual‑care solutions for neurodegenerative diseases. “This creates an urgent need to slow dementia‑related cognitive decline via digital therapeutics, deployed either as adjunct or monotherapy.”

Rajput is optimistic about emerging technologies delivering gamified cognitive tasks on digital tablets, where machine‑learning algorithms tailor exercises to each patient’s individual baseline. “Furthermore, the platform continuously tracks patient cognition, enabling clinical teams to conduct remote monitoring, ongoing assessment and intervention,” Rajput noted. “Given the enormous unmet clinical need in this space, this could represent one of the most transformative developments for DTx to date.”

6. Radiomics Builds Momentum in Drug Development

Rose Higgins, CEO of HealthMyne, predicts drug developers will increase their use of radiomics, or advanced imaging analytics, to guide clinical‑trial strategies.

“For instance, life‑science companies can create more robust inclusion‑exclusion criteria for clinical trials and predict patient outcomes with higher accuracy by leveraging radiomics. AI algorithms analyzing conventional images such as CT and PET scans generate fresh insights into tumour biology,” Higgins said.

“By enabling researchers to obtain objective, real‑world measurements quantifying tumour characteristics in cancer patients, radiomics empowers clinicians to deliver personalized, data‑driven forecasts of how individual patients’ disease may progress.”

7. Maturing Artificial‑Intelligence Adoption across Pharma

Pharmaceutical adoption of artificial intelligence remains in early stages. Nevertheless, according to Sujay Jadhav, CEO of Verana Health, advances in AI will grant the industry novel insights into patients and diseases in the coming year.

“Specifically, natural‑language processing, machine learning and computer vision will unlock deeper understanding of disease progression, clinical phenotypes and outcomes, informing the full drug lifecycle,” Jadhav stated.

“Valuable unstructured real‑world data resides within electronic health records,” he added. “Applying NLP to interpret free‑text documentation and extract meaningful insights from millions of physician notes will allow life‑science organizations to advance research and develop more targeted, effective therapies for patients.”

8. Precision Dosing Becomes Mainstream

Preventable adverse drug events are widespread, causing hundreds of thousands of hospital admissions annually. Sirj Goswami, Co‑Founder and CEO of InsightRX, states that expanded precision‑dosing and monitoring for specialty drugs — especially agents with narrow therapeutic indices and highly variable patient responses — can mitigate this burden.

“By 2022, many pharmaceutical companies will begin embedding precision dosing early within specialty‑drug development workflows to close real‑world data gaps and support more accurate dosage recommendations for new therapies,” Goswami said.

9. Virtual Healthcare Drives Further Health‑IT Transformation

Andrew Burns, Chief Growth Officer at DrFirst, forecasts expanding patient demand for home‑based healthcare will create a domino effect across health IT, including digital technologies enabling large‑scale virtual care.

“This technology will go beyond telehealth visits to encompass new modalities supporting patients at home throughout their care journey,” Burns explained. “In turn, expanded remote‑care opportunities will fuel demand for improved communication and connectivity between patients and their full care teams.”

As populations age across large parts of the globe, demand for virtual healthcare is set to grow. “We can strengthen patient connection and engagement through secure access to health data, seamlessly integrated with personalized, relevant clinical and educational resources aligned with individual needs,” Burns said.

“Patients will expect greater, easier access to their medical records and anticipate credible health information to play a more active role in their treatment decisions.”

 (Source: Google News, for reference only)