Pharma 5: Trailblazing Tech Trends of 2025

READY OR NOT, a revolution is here.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, combined with new ways to leverage large data sets, digital technologies and automation, bring significant opportunities and considerable challenges to the healthcare industry. The result? Cutting-edge practices and unconventional approaches to therapy that promise to improve patient care, both in terms of delivery and outcome.

Here are five tech trends poised to shake things up in 2025:

1) AI in drug discovery and delivery innovation. AI is upping the pharma ante. With the capacity for drug discovery and development, drug repurposing, improving pharmaceutical productivity, improving clinical trials, reducing human workload, matching therapies with patients, using clinical data to create personalized therapy plans, repurposing existing drugs for new indications and even getting involved in future drug development, AI is changing the game.^1,2 AI helps pharma companies better understand disease mechanisms, identify patients who will respond favorably to a drug and consequently develop more effective products. Time and resources saved. Patient experience improved.³

2) Digital biomarkers. Biomarkers provide an important piece of the clinical puzzle. While traditional biomarkers report snapshots of what a patient’s body is doing at the time of biomarker collection, digital biomarkers give the longer-term view since they are collected in a patient’s natural environment over time. They identify and track normal health patterns and alert patients and providers when something is “off.” Because data is collected by digital devices that are portable, wearable, implantable or digestible³ — and accessible to the patient’s care team — the data equips doctors to develop a personalized treatment plan that can, in many cases, be implemented remotely.

3) Digital therapeutics (DTx). DTx deliver medical interventions directly to patients. But instead of relying on drug-based therapies, DTx use evidence-based, clinically evaluated software to treat, manage or prevent a wide range of conditions.⁴ DTx work together with drug-based medications, devices and other therapies to optimize patient care and health outcomes.⁵

The DTx market size is already massive ($5.53 billion in 2022) and is projected to grow to $28.66 billion by 2030.⁶

Not surprisingly, major pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, Sanofi and Novartis are rapidly forming partnerships with technology companies currently developing DTx. Some are developing stand-alone products that work independent of drug-based therapies, while others are working with tech companies to develop DTx “around the pill,” meaning DTx that work in conjunction with drug-based therapies.⁷

4) Clinical informatics. Electronic health records, continuous patient monitoring and data points galore together create information overload in critical care. For clinicians, considering every data point at once before making what could be life-or-death decisions simply isn’t possible.

Enter clinical informatics (CI). CI captures, tracks and synthesizes crucial information clinicians can use to help make better decisions. From health history and vital signs to laboratory test results and real-time symptoms, CI provides critical information to clinicians that can both identify and predict patients at risk for poor outcomes. The goal is improved decision making at bedside, leading to improved outcomes and minimized medical error.⁸

5) Flexible manufacturing for personalized medicine. Thanks to genomic sequencing, personalized medicine is rapidly becoming dream-turned-reality. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach to the practice of medicine, personalized medicine aims to provide the right treatment to the right patient at the right dose at the right time.⁹ Individual genetic profiles give doctors better insight into what medicine or therapy will work best for a given patient, in what dose and with what frequency.

However, drug manufacturers aren’t equipped to handle individualized orders for medications. The result? Adopting new technologies to enable their manufacturing facilities to adapt to changes in formula fast and produce small batches of personalized drugs.¹⁰