IT Vendors Must Bolster Pharma Credentials In The APAC Market

As the 2011 patent cliff approaches, pharmaceutical companies globally are expanding into the APAC region due to the hope of capturing new market share as well as to lower costs by outsourcing clinical trials and manufacturing. Similarly, homegrown organisations are rapidly gaining scale as they offer contract manufacturing or R&D services to multinationals, or invest in their own discovery and resulting monetisation of drugs. “This opens an opportunity for technology vendors to enter the market, offering solutions to handle the complex IT demands”, said Adam Jura, Senior Analyst, Ovum.

“Vendors have often been poor at providing IT for the pharma industry, but given that the companies within the region are facing such massive pressure, there’s an opportunity for vendors to step up their game and capitalise – but they have to understand the pharma industry,” said Jura.

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The global pharma industry is facing a number of key resistors to growth – in particular, the impending 2011 patent cliff, when a large number of patents will expire and revenues will be lost to generics coming onto the market. The top 50 innovator companies are set to lose $78 billion in global branded sales from drugs facing patent expiry over the 2010–14 period. These companies will also continue to experience generic erosion of brands which expired before 2010 (equating to a loss of $32 billion), resulting in a total loss of sales from expired brands of $110 billion in 2014 versus 2009. “Price cuts, reimbursement restrictions, and growing regulatory pressures are further set to limit sales growth going forward,” said Jura.

“Newer companies do not have complicated IT infrastructures and legacy systems, nor do they have complex, often paper-based, processes that took years to develop, making the implementation and adoption of a technology solution that much easier,” said Ruchi Mallya, Analyst, Ovum. With all the opportunities that the APAC life sciences industry promises, it remains a unique and complex market and vendors will need to understand the ins and outs of both the developed and emerging pharma and biotech sectors to truly be successful in APAC.

A range of technologies are implemented by life sciences companies to support the efficient and effective execution of key business processes across the product lifecycle. Critically, organisations are using a mix of pharma-specific technologies as well as more generic horizontal technologies that have been adapted for their specific purposes. The figure attached highlights some of the key IT solutions that pharma companies in Australia, China, India, and Japan either have in place already or have on their shopping lists for future purchase.