Will China Decimate the UK’s Pharmaceutical Industry?

The Chinese pharmaceutical industry’s reputation has taken some blows in recent years with reports of poor manufacturing processes, falsification of data and bribery scandals.

In terms of drug discovery and R&D, China is well behind for an economy of its size. However, figures show that the pendulum is beginning to swing with analysts predicting a transformation in China’s position on the global pharmaceutical market in the next decade.

Not only that, western investment from drug giants such as AZ, GSK and Pfizer has been the catalyst for the tightening of China’s drugs regulator the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA).

With more than 1billion inhabitants and an estimated 1.9million factories and manufacturing plants, China is fast becoming an extremely attractive destination for drug makers, the most seductive lure of all being staff costs as a rising number of Chinese scientists are returning from the US to their homeland .

If analysts’ theories ring true, what does that mean for the European Pharmaceutical industry? And what can Europe do to stay ahead of the curve?

The answer is of course tech innovation and below is our list of tech concerns that need to be met immediately by any European pharmaceutical manufacturer hoping to stave off the threat from the East:

Machine LearningThe idea behind machine learning is that the constant strife for refinement and innovation need not necessarily be carried out by human hands, menial tasks such as testing can now be carried out by the software itself meaning a saving in cost and time for any company. Machine learning can be broken down into:

1. Supervised learning: The computer is presented with example inputs and their desired outputs, given by a “teacher”, and the goal is to learn a general rule that maps inputs to outputs.
2. Unsupervised learning: No labels are given to the learning algorithm, leaving it on its own to find structure in its input. Unsupervised learning can be a goal in-itself (discovering hidden patterns in data) or a means towards an end (feature learning).
3. Reinforcement learning: A computer program interacts with a dynamic environment in which it must perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle or playing a game against an opponent). The program is provided feedback in terms of rewards and punishments as it navigates its problem space.

BotsThe creation of bots also helps with the labour on the tech side of your company, you could consider:

1. Web crawler or Web spider, a computer program that does automated tasks
2. Chatterbot or Chat bot, a computer program that converses in natural language

Cloud StorageUse of cloud storage is a contentious subject but is, inevitably, the way all business is moving, especially those which generate huge amounts of crucial data. Just some of the benefits of using cloud within pharma include:

1. Security: The cloud, in many cases is more secure than on-premises infrastructure especially in terms of disaster recovery.
2. Usability: All cloud storage services reviewed in this topic have desktop folders for Macs and PCs. This allows users to drag and drop files between the cloud storage and their local storage/device.
3. Bandwidth: You can avoid emailing files to individuals and instead send a web link to recipients through your email.
4. Accessibility: Stored files can be accessed from anywhere in the world via Internet connection.
5. Disaster Recovery: It is highly recommended that businesses have a back-up plan in case of an emergency. By providing a second copy of important files, stored at a remote location your cloud based solution acts as the perfect back-up to vital data.
6. Cost Savings: Annual operating costs can be reduced by using cloud storage; it costs around 3 cents per gigabyte to store data internally. Users can see additional cost savings because it does not require internal power to store information remotely.

The automation of legacy systems, machine learning that allows factories, testing labs and storage facilities to become truly smart and state of the art monitoring systems that usher in a new age of efficiency within the manufacturing process are the only routes not just to advancement, but for survival for western pharma.