Industry 4.0

Toronto-based Intrepid Labs, which we profiled a year ago, has closed an Avant Bio-backed $7 million seed round, bringing its total financing to over $11 million. The company’s Valiant platform is an autonomous lab technology that pairs machine-learning algorithms with robotics to potentially explore up to 1 billion possible formulations. It aims to cut drug-product design…

Cell therapies hold immense promise but, traditionally, carry a similarly large price tag often linked to complex, manual manufacturing. In its latest move to help make these life-saving  and -enhancing treatments more scalable and potentially accessible, Cellares is partnering with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to automate the clinical-scale manufacturing…

From FHIR-based APIs to “hybrid data models” and blockchain-enabled audit trails, biopharma companies are exploring a range of strategies in their quest to incorporate Real World Data (RWD) into clinical trials. But technology alone won’t resolve the deeper issues at play. From bridging disparate data sources to safeguarding patient privacy under evolving regulations, sponsors face…

Almirall’s MES/MOM director Francesc Luque is spearheading a digital transformation of the company’s pharmaceutical manufacturing, shifting from paper-based and disconnected systems to a fully integrated, “smart plant” model. In a role he assumed in early 2023, the main shift has been consolidating the company’s “Integrated Factory” program and finalizing the definition of its Manufacturing Execution…

Manufacturers in the biotech sector face unique challenges ranging from stringent regulatory requirements to complex production processes. Implementing an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system tailored to their needs is crucial for ensuring compliance, efficiency, and scalability. Whether you are a life sciences CMO (contract manufacturing organization), a pharmaceutical manufacturer with an R&D department, or a…

While the pharmaceutical industry tries to remain competitive in today’s fast-paced digital world, chief information officers are left with a conundrum; How can they adopt necessary new technologies while dealing with existing technical debt? So what is this technical debt? When outdated processes or deferred maintenance accumulates over time which makes it hard for companies…

Biopharma’s gradual embrace of the cloud is picking up pace. In 2022, PwC surveyed more than one hundred pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Forty percent were already running all of their operations in the cloud; another 55% hoped to join them by late this year. The report also found that the most successful companies used…

The pharma industry has long relied on tried-and-true drug formulation approaches sometimes rooted in trial and error, but this reliance on the familiar has created a bottleneck in the development of new and better medicines. University of Toronto Professor Christine Allen, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Intrepid Labs, points out that the traditional drug…

Using job posting data gathered via the data aggregation service Apify.com, we sifted through a total of 1,755 recent pharma and biotech job listings to find, unsurprisingly, that managers working in senior and director-level roles are the best-paid in the industry. Across the entire data set, the median salary range for the job descriptions was…

The success of any organization is dependent on consistent, clear, and reliable information sharing among all internal stakeholders. In the pharmaceutical industry, where there are multiple complex layers within manufacturing processes, communication among teams is especially critical. If information-sharing gaps occur among these layers, vulnerabilities could result in costly errors impacting all levels of the…

The global counterfeit drug trade has exploded into a deadly public health crisis, with the rise of online pharmacies and increasingly sophisticated criminal networks fueling the trend. A 2020 analysis from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), found that the problem is global in scope…

In a move to bolster its presence in the pioneering biotech hub of South San Francisco, Astellas Pharma has unveiled a $90 million West Coast Innovation Center. The newly constructed 154,000-square-foot facility consolidates the company’s previously dispersed Bay Area operations, including research, technical operations, medical and development and commercial teams, under one roof. “I want…

[Updated May 10, 2024] In the face of rising R&D costs and growing pricing pressures from payers, the pharma and biotech sectors continue to transform to adapt to an evolving landscape. While workforce reductions persist in 2024 for some companies, major players like AbbVie, AGC Biologics, Amgen, Novartis and Thermo Fisher Scientific are demonstrating confidence…

The pharmaceutical industry is at a critical juncture: AI and other technological advances offer unprecedented potential, yet the cost of developing new drugs has ballooned for decades, surpassing $2 billion in recent years with the projected return on investment (ROI) falling to a mere 1.2% in 2022, according to Deloitte. Another dimension of the problem…

Biotech startup Lindus Health just made a big splash by adding MIT professor and Moderna co-founder Robert Langer,  Sc.D., to its advisory board. Lindus aims to shake up the world of clinical trials with its “anti-CRO” approach that promises faster and more reliable trials for life sciences companies. The addition of Langer, described as the…

In 2023, generative AI (GenAI) entered the mainstream, capturing the attention of both the public and a growing number of biotechs. One of the most prominent Big Tech firms driving the trend is NVIDIA, which has forged alliances with biotechs ranging from Genentech, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Evozyne, among others.  The momentum is continuing in early…

The allure of healthcare has long captivated Big Tech giants. Over the past fifteen years or so, several prominent companies in the sector have ventured into the life sciences sector with ambitious projects, only to often find themselves retreating. The dynamic appears to be changing, particularly in drug discovery, thanks in part to burgeoning data…

In July, the life sciences services company Eversana revealed it was partnering with AWS to tap generative AI (gen AI) for pharma and other life science customers. It aimed to “pharmatize” gen AI, as the company put it then. Now, the company has revealed the first technology from that partnership – a regulatory review automation…

The tale of digital pharma and biotech in 2023 is one of two realities. In one corner, you have AI and digital-focused startups and sometimes executives at Big Pharma companies with grand AI ambitions proclaiming the power of the technology. But on the other side of the pharma-AI coin is a more cautious crowd. Here,…

Traditionally, the tech and biotech sectors in the U.S. have been concentrated in a handful of regions — most notably in areas such as Boston, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Southern California. But the Biden administration aims to distribute innovation more evenly through the U.S. To that end, the administration has designated 31 tech hubs across…

In the realm of drug discovery, AI is making waves, and 2023 could potentially be a pivotal year for this technology. As the technology enters the popular consciousness, pharma employees are wondering “why they can’t have similar AI-driven tools for their professional tasks,” said Diane Wuest, head of digital R&D at Sanofi, in a recent…

AI in drug discovery is a topic that gets an outsized amount of attention, observes Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera, a company specializing in antibody drug discovery. “It’s as if people are saying, ‘AI is here, it’s going to save us. Thank God, we’re finally gonna be able to create drugs,” he said. “To me,…

As the biotech industry matures, several North American cities are emerging biotech hubs, aiming to become the next epicenters of innovation and growth. While traditional hubs like Boston and San Francisco continue to dominate, a new wave of cities is making strides in biotech. For instance, Pittsburgh, an up-and-coming biotech hub, is tapping its biomanufacturing…

Hey there, drug discovery professionals: Ever wondered where you stand in the grand scheme of drug discovery data-savviness? We’ve created a short quiz to help you get an idea. Drug discovery and development is an increasingly data-intensive field, underscoring the need for data science to be a core drug discovery discipline. The industry has taken…

Founded in 2008, Ginkgo Bioworks’ stock jumped almost 25% on August 29, hitting $2.22, after unveiling a five-year partnership with Google Cloud. The partnership centers around the development of novel AI tools for biology and biosecurity. In particular, Ginkgo hopes to further its mission to make biology easier to engineer in the AI era. Opting…