Cognizant has partnered with the Pharma Industry Awards 2023 as impact ambassador for smart manufacturing for the second year running and has a keen commitment to digital transformation across pharma manufacturing. The impact ambassador programme highlights thought leadership from companies supporting the sector in Ireland.
In this interview, BusinessRiver, organisers of the awards, caught up with Trevor Marshall, senior director, head of consultancy for life sciences manufacturing at Cognizant, to discuss the big issues facing the Irish pharma sector right now and what is to come.
What have been the biggest technological changes in the past year and how are companies facing those challenges?
It would be difficult to think about technological changes in the past year without mentioning generative artificial intelligence (AI). Rather than looking at these new technologies as challenges, I think companies are looking at the potential opportunities. There are a lot of day-to-day activities that could be aided by generative AI in a co-pilot mode. Some of the example areas of interest for generative AI include, report writing in research and development (R&D), writing standard operating procedures (SOPs), predictive maintenance with recommendations and supply chain forecasting. We only see this list increasing over the coming years.
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How fast is technology changing in the sector and is that pace accelerating or slowing?
The industry has set big targets in relation to productivity, be that in relation new product introductions or increasing yield from existing processes. Add to that the environmental and social governance regulatory requirements and you will find that new technologies are coming to market all the time. We are still in the middle of a technological revolution, with the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) and with the introduction of generative AI there is still a bit to go before we can say the technology blueprint for life science manufacturing is complete.
What are the biggest risks with adopting new technologies in this sector?
As with all technology adoption in the life science manufacturing space, ensuring there is no impact to patient safety is the number one requirement. Some of the new digital products that are coming to market will require a different skill set, software engineers that will be writing code to improve business processes and analytics to speed up decision making. We need to ensure that learnings from the validation approach for shop floor digital products are transferred to the teams creating these new digital products that will run in the cloud typically away from the manufacturing process itself.
Describe the hurdles when working in a regulated industry?
In life sciences we operate to specific regulatory guidelines set out by government authorities. These essential regulations mean we cannot approach design and build in a fail-fast manner, unlike other industries. The system requirements and designs are approved in advance before systems are configured and tested against those requirements, before being released to production systems. The manufacturing processes that we design must be repeatable, whilst also ensuring that critical process parameters and critical quality attributes are recorded and readily available for internal quality assurance and external regulatory agency review.
How can firms get from research to product faster?
For many, R&D and manufacturing are often not connected organisationally, except at the C-suite level. Accelerating the launch of new medicines, cannot be performed without R&D understanding the constraints of manufacturing and vice versa. By connecting both these divisions early on, there comes a shared understanding and learning along with shared taxonomy language. This means we can start thinking about digital systems that span across research and manufacturing, and enable digital transfer of product recipes and facility fit characteristics, which ultimately leads to faster product launch.
Tell us about the range of projects Cognizant has worked on within the Irish pharma sector in recent years?
Cognizant in Ireland is renowned for the delivery for large scale batch automation, integrated with manufacturing executions systems, site wide historians and multivariate process data analytics, which can provide real-time analysis of equipment and process performance. We work with clients both in the R&D and manufacturing to accelerate product launch. We also deploy virtual and augmented reality solutions for Irish clients to enable training of new lines, where access to the lines is limited and simulated environments provide a beneficial end-user experience.
This is the second year running Cognizant has been impact ambassador at the Pharma Awards. How big an impact did you feel you made last year?
As one of the largest digital service providers in the market, we bring shared learnings to our clients. We continue to have a perspective on the latest technologies such as generative AI and make big investments in our people to lead the way in determining how these technologies can improve business outcomes for life science manufacturing. Our unwavering commitment to life science and the positive impact we make can be measured by the number of graduates we take in each year, who get an opportunity to work on some of the most innovative projects in the industry.
How do you feel about being nominated for the graduate programme of the year award?
It is a privilege to be shortlisted for the graduate programme of the year award, alongside AbbVie, APC & VLE Therapeutics, Bristol Myers Squibb, Koerber Pharma Software and SSPC. Our graduate training program has been in existence for over 10 years, with multiple intakes globally and up to 30 graduates in Ireland alone. We believe it is important to attract and grow the next generation of life science leaders. Being short-listed is a recognition of the hard work that our learning and development and engineering teams continue to put into the graduate program year on year.
The Pharma Industry Awards will take place at The Clayton Hotel, Silver Springs, Cork on Thursday, October 26th, 2023, and attracted more than 150 submissions from world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. For more information on the awards visit www.pharmaawards.ie.
Pharma Industry Awards Organiser, BusinessRiver partner with global thought leaders to highlight the importance of collaboration and growth within the sector. If you would like to partner with us contact kevin@businessriver.com.
For more information and insights from Cognizant go to: www.cognizant.com/pharmamanufacturing