Disruptive technologies

India is not called ‘the pharmacy of the world’ for nothing. Even though it is hectic to keep the label for now due to the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, India is one of the front-running countries when it comes to drug making and distribution. Many pharmaceutical companies in the country are using disruptive technologies to identify the basic ingredients and streamlining the drug making process. India is the largest provider of generic drugs to the global healthcare market. The country’s pharmaceutical sector supplies over 50% of global demand for various vaccines, 40% of generic demand in the US, and 25% of all medicines in the United Kingdom. In a nutshell, Indian pharmaceutical companies enjoy an important position in the healthcare sector. Unfortunately, despite being an important part of the global medical system, 25% of total drug manufacturing goes unused. Therefore, to upgrade the drug making process and provide end-to-end supervision to its supply chain, Indian pharmaceutical companies are embracing digitization. IndustryWired has listed the top three pharmaceutical companies that are using disruptive technology to upgrade drug making.

Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories

Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories is an international pharmaceutical company that serves three business services including pharmaceutical products and active ingredients, global generics, and proprietary services. The company mainly operates in India, USA, Russia, Europe, and other CIS countries. Dr. Reddy’s started adopting technology early on when the digitization wave was still in the first phase. Even for Research & Development purposes, the Pharmaceutical companies was using electronic lab notebooks for the past four years. Therefore Dr. Reddy’s data is stored in an electronic data format, which makes it easy for the company to conduct analysis and leverage insights. Besides, the company also keeps ground data on Batch Production Records and Quality Analysis records. 

Dr. Reddy’s uses machine learning algorithms fed with the company’s data to improve the agility and efficiency of drug making. Like many other front running Pharmaceutical companies that use machine learning to identify the basic material for drug making, Dr. Reddy’s also adopts disruptive technology to fast-track manufacturing and balance quality assessment. To further leverage an end-to-end sophistication with technology, the Pharmaceutical companies is using data science to streamline sales and marketing drives. In addition, Dr. Reddy’s is also using cloud computing, artificial intelligence, NLP, RPA, chatbots, etc to power their drug making.

Sun Pharmaceutical

Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd is the fourth largest speciality generic pharmaceutical company in the world. The company’s core strength lies in its ability to excel in developing generics and technologically complex products backed by its dedicated teas in formulations, process chemistry, and analytics development. Sun Pharmaceutical uses disruptive technologies to manufacture and market a large basket of pharmaceutical formulations covering a broad spectrum of chronic and acute therapies and drugs. Besides, the company also uses its technology capabilities to span the development of differentiated products including liposomal delivery, inhalers, lyophilised injections, nasal sprays, etc. 

Sun Pharmaceutical unravelled a mobile application called ‘RespiTrack’ to track the treatment progress of its patients and increase compliance to medication for better management of asthma disease. The Pharmaceutical companies core team also believes the artificial intelligence will not replace workforce expertise, instead, it will augment their efficiency in data collection and mining.

Abbott India

Abbott India is a pharmaceutical company that is playing with technology to streamline many healthcare processes. The company believes that health is the key to human potential and they can change the way the healthcare system works using disruptive technologies. Abbott India is already building life-changing technologies such as the revolutionary FreeStyle Libre system that monitors glucose readings. It helps people understand their health and create new ways to interact with their doctors to improve their care. Besides, the Pharmaceutical companies is taking big data as a major factor to accelerate drug making and other improved health outcomes. Using machine learning, Abbott India has found that in combination, patient demographics plus haematological measures and blood proteins are much more accurate in diagnosing heart attacks as well as heart diseases than the current method. This will help the company streamline heart-related diagnostic processes. 

Abbott India unleashed ‘Maya,’ an artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant bot to communicate with employees in simple natural language, and provides them with the assistance they need. She acts as a facilitator, helping employees to tap into an enterprise knowledge base through familiar, easy-to-use communication channels.