This DXC-sponsored Reuters Events paper examines the need and opportunities for automation in pharmaceutical industry.

The way life sciences businesses and regulators collaborate to bring safe new therapies to market is ripe for transformation. Digitalization and automation offer speedier creation, submission and querying of the volumes of documentation inherent in research and commercialization.

Yet the promise of automated end-to-end workflow leading to more efficient and error-free processes, as well as faster time to insight and approval, remains as yet largely unrealized. The advent of electronic standards (eCTD) for filing documents long ago, while proving its worth, has not yet been truly transformational.

Manual and paper-based processes die hard. Friction abounds internally and externally. Internally, pharma companies are still digitizing and harmonizing data. Externally, regulators are only slowly adopting digital and at different rates around the world. But the lockdown-induced challenges during the pandemic to the way the entire healthcare system operates have changed everyone’s sense of what’s possible and their sense of haste. Digital-first approaches are now widely accepted as the way forward, automation is seen as key and new AI and other software tools to enable the next stages of transformation are almost ready for primetime.