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…
Is technical debt hindering CIOs from adopting new technology in pharma?
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 When outdated processes or deferred maintenance accumulates over time which makes it hard for companies…
Strategies for tapping the cloud to scale data transformation in biopharma
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…
At AWS re:Invent, Pfizer exec frames digital as a core business strategy
In the midst of a global pandemic, Pfizer, under the leadership of its chief digital and technology officer Lidia Fonseca, achieved what was once thought impossible. The company, with the partnership of BioNTech, developed a COVID-19 vaccine in only 269 days, a process that traditionally would have taken 8 to 10 years. While prior research…
Sanofi puts AI ‘Plai’ app at the center of drug discovery and clinical trial operations
The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has unveiled a new AI-powered app called Plai, developed in partnership with AI platform Aily Labs. This move is part of Sanofi’s plan to become the pioneer in fully integrating AI into all operations, according to CEO Paul Hudson. Plai, designed to compile and process Sanofi’s internal data from various…
Driving pharma lab digitalization forward with LIMS
Digitalization has taken the pharma industry by storm. Most of the laboratories have embarked upon digitalization in the recent years. A central player in this transformative journey is the laboratory information management system (LIMS), a digital platform designed to manage all the data and processes in a lab, from sample tracking to reporting and quality…
Working backwards: AWS’s strategy for pharma’s cloud-enabled transformation
The meteoric rise of the AI sector is hard to fathom. Projections from Precedence Research suggest that the global AI market could balloon by 2600% from 2022 to 2032, hitting $1.87 trillion — an annual growth rate of 39%. In pharma, AI and data science demand is surging though overall growth is sluggish. Despite advances…