Express Pharma: Cognizant’s Vice President of Life Sciences Practice Talks About Demand and Technology Trends in the Industry

“By 2016, over 60 per cent of the top 10 drug sales are expected to be specialty drugs,” says R. Meenakshisundaram. “In marketing, the key trend continues to be around the “value-versus-volume” debate. There is an increasing focus on real-world analytics to establish product and pricing differentiation and delivery in the context of population health. Market access is also a key focus.”

He adds, “Disruptive technologies have passed the chasm and are now becoming mainstream. The SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)  stack is now a common requirement and evaluated across multiple opportunities and business use cases. There is a strong push towards digital innovation as devices are becoming more a norm than an exception. This is bringing about a dramatic change in process delivery and efficiency.”

According to Meenakshisundaram, the industry is also witnessing significant portfolio consolidation and increased mergers and acquisitions. “The operating model has evolved and is highly collaborative—between peer companies and with academia. Most of these changes are being seen in North America and are rapidly catching on in the rest of the world,” he says.

“Currently, a bulk of the Indian market is focused on generics as opposed to the US and Europe, which are more innovation-driven,” he says. “The services focus is therefore very different, albeit with some common touch-points. Services in the Indian market are driven more by automation, quality benchmarks, and increased compliance needs. The process focus extends to manufacturing, quality assurance, and regulatory compliance. We are seeing an increased focus on research and development with investments in developing novel entities. We do believe that the trend will translate into some companies going after the end-to-end innovator business.”

He informs that Cognizant is witnessing a spurt in requirements from the Indian market with companies benchmarking themselves against global standards to meet growing quality and regulatory demands. “China, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Korea are other emerging markets for the company, a few of which are emerging as research and clinical hubs for global pharma companies. Significant investment push from governments to provide universal healthcare is providing the pharma sector with new growth opportunities and markets such as China,” he adds.

“Globalization and collaboration are becoming a core part of the operating model and service delivery,” he says. “Companies not just want to improve performance efficiency and effectiveness, but also drive innovation and transformation. The focus is thus is on transforming the client’s business process and underlying technology with a global operating model.”

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