Industry news

• Speeding past patient access barriers to deliver therapies in a post-pandemic world

  02 April 2021 FierceBiotech

  As light begins to shine at the end of the pandemic tunnel, drug manufacturers and healthcare systems are looking at the best ways to maintain the digital momentum spurred by the crisis to provide support to patients and overcome any barriers the transition to a post COVID-19 world may reveal.

• Cracking the long-haul COVID code: How a basic symptom-tracking app may predict monthslong cases

  02 April 2021 Andrea Park / FiercePharma

  Despite more than a year's worth of observation and intense study, there’s a lot we still don’t know about COVID-19. One of the most enduring mysteries is “long COVID syndrome,” where symptoms stick around for weeks or even months longer than the virus’s typical life span—and often in younger, healthier patients who had particularly mild cases of the disease.

• FDA's 2021 Focus Areas Of Regulatory Science: 5 Trends To Watch

  01 April 2021 Bikash Chatterjee / Life Science Leader

  One can easily argue that we have seen more innovation in the pharmaceutical industry in the last decade than in the past 50 years. The tools we use today to characterize and construct drug therapies, from next-generation gene sequencing technologies to CRISPR/Cas9, give us unprecedented capabilities to identify and treat new disease states. However, these technologies would not have been so influential in the absence of a regulatory framework within which to apply them.

• WHO issues alert for falsified COVID-19 vaccine

  01 April 2021 Hannah Balfour / European Pharmaceutical Review

  The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that a falsified COVID-19 vaccine, identified as Pfizer’s BNT162b2, could still be in circulation in the Americas.

• Speeding past patient access barriers to deliver therapies in a post-pandemic world

  31 March 2021 FiercePharma

  As light begins to shine at the end of the pandemic tunnel, drug manufacturers and healthcare systems are looking at the best ways to maintain the digital momentum spurred by the crisis to provide support to patients and overcome any barriers the transition to a post COVID-19 world may reveal.

• How new insights into COVID's spike protein could guide treatment design

  31 March 2021 Arlene Weintraub / FiercePharma

  SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, is structurally similar to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused a much smaller outbreak two decades ago. So why has today’s iteration of the virus been so much more infectious?

• Pharmaceutical packaging market to value over $144bn by 2027

  30 March 2021 Hannah Balfour / European Pharmaceutical Review

  New research indicates that the pharmaceutical packaging market will be worth $144.23 billion by 2027, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.1 percent between 2020 and 2027. The market was valued at $88.87 billion in 2019.

• Pharma DTC ads drive consumers to seek info—and arms them for doc visits, study finds

  30 March 2021 Beth Snyder Bulik / FiercePharma

  While stuck at home during the pandemic, people saw more pharma ads than ever. Not just on TV sets, but on computers and mobile devices.

• Europe to lead growth in the biodegradable pharmaceutical packaging market

  29 March 2021 Hannah Balfour / European Pharmaceutical Review

  According to a report, the desire to reduce waste, technological advancement and regulatory standards will all drive the adoption of biodegradable pharmaceutical packaging.

• NK Cells are Now Better Serial Killers

  29 March 2021 FiercePharma

  Could native, exhausted and no-longer-functioning natural killer cells (NK cells) in cancer patients be rescued and revived by a novel, off-the-shelf immuno-oncology therapeutic that also happens to be a pervasive serial cancer killer?