The global response to the Covid-19 pandemic was unprecedented. Were it not for the close cooperation among governments and the rapid information-sharing among scientists, the world would not have seen the various vaccines that stemmed the deadly spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Under normal circumstances, it takes several years to develop, test and release a new drug. The Covid-19 pandemic compressed the usual process to less than a year. Among the most widely-used vaccines were results of transnational partnerships: BioNTech-Pfizer (German and American), Oxford-AstraZeneca (British and Swedish), and Sanofi-GSK (French and British).
Apart from this example of international cooperation in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, the world has witnessed remarkable advancements in areas like gene editing, regenerative medicine, precision medicine, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies for various diseases including cancer, rare genetic disorders, and infectious diseases.
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With the rapid advance of technology, healthcare has moved beyond the clinic and hospital. Today, the emerging digital health sector has greatly improved healthcare delivery, patient outcomes, and efficiency through telemedicine, health apps, wearable devices, and remote patient monitoring.
In the United States, Japan-owned Omron Healthcare launched VitalSight™, a remote patient monitoring (RPM) product to manage hypertension, facilitate closer patient-to-physician communication, and improve data sharing to improve treatment engagement and health outcomes. Developed before the pandemic, VitalSight™ addresses the problem of hypertension, which afflicts 1 billion adults around the world, of which 166 million are in the United States.
In Singapore, the company set up the HeartVoice Telehealth platform, which allows doctors to provide telemedicine consultations and remote health monitoring programs to their patients to treat acute and chronic conditions. It plans to expand the platform across the region.
Genomics has also made its own breakthroughs, which allow for a clearer understanding of genetic factors in diseases and individualized treatment approaches. Precision medicine, based on genomic data, is increasingly making progress in developing and providing personalized therapies and diagnostics.
Leading the efforts in this field, the Stanford Center for Definitive and Curative Medicine (CDCM) is on a mission “to cure patients with currently incurable diseases through the development of innovative cell- and gene-based therapies (CGT).”
Since it was launched in 2017, the CDCM has been working on around 24 projects in the discovery, pre-clinical, and early trial phases.
Meanwhile, the healthcare services sector has also benefitted from IT solutions for revenue cycle management, medical billing, consulting, and outsourcing of non-core functions.
In Serbia, Japanese pharmaceutical giant Takeda has worked closely with the public and private sectors over the past decade to establish the country’s first telemedicine and telehealth service.
To meet the ever-changing demands of patients, doctors and caregivers, the healthcare sector will deliver even better results and further improve operational efficiencies with more international partnerships.
