After the COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in healthcare systems around the world, one way the sector is learning lessons from the past year is through improved data analytics and collaboration.

Fragmented approaches to healthcare have often slowed the sector's rate of progress, and the COVID-19 outbreak has shown industry leaders that enhancing the way data is collected and shared between companies and research organizations can allow for a more robust response to health crises such as future pandemics, Mark Halford, senior vice president for client services in life sciences and healthcare at the business process management company WNS (Holdings) Ltd., said in an interview.

"One of the big lessons both in Europe and the U.S. is that a fragmented healthcare system makes it pretty difficult to have a consolidated response to something like a pandemic," Halford said. "When it breaks down into the different players, the different providers, the different regulations and different governing bodies, I think fragmentation has proven to be an issue in dealing with a global crisis."

Using advanced analytics to automate and share data can help researchers gather information and feedback in real time to derive deeper insights from the market, Halford said.

The pharmaceutical sector in particular has been a late adopter of artificial intelligence for data gathering, and that has hurt the pandemic response, Halford said. "When it comes to running these models of how a vaccine is going to fare in the real world, some of the artificial intelligence models in the industry are lagging behind," the WNS executive said.

On a May 6 earnings call, Moderna Inc. CEO Stéphane Bancel acknowledged that the industry had fallen behind when it came to AI, but said the technology would soon be integrated at the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer as well as among their biotech and pharma peers.

"It is the same management revolution as 20 to 30 years ago when personal computers entered the workforce," Bancel said. "We want everyone at Moderna to understand and use AI in everything we do — AI will become part of our DNA."

Moderna plans to triple investment in digital solutions in 2021 from 2020 levels, including automation and AI in R&D, clinical trials, manufacturing and commercial operations as the company grows in scale, the CEO added.

One reason for the late uptake of AI by many players in the sector could be that, in such a highly regulated industry as pharmaceuticals, automated information can be viewed as a liability, WNS Corporate Vice President of Healthcare and Life Sciences Sameer Singla told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Crowd-sourcing reports of adverse reactions to drugs, for example, was often seen as inviting additional scrutiny from regulators, leading companies to shy away from automation and data integration altogether, Singla said. But the need to rapidly collate data on experimental COVID-19 vaccines and therapies appears to have shifted some of these long-held reservations by drug manufacturers.

"Pharmaceutical companies were being conservative to the point that they would rather do things manually or hire third-party agencies, so that nothing is stored on their servers," Singla said. "One thing that has changed significantly over the last 12 months: I would never have heard of companies as big as GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson agreeing to share data between them."

Sharing data to prevent pandemics

Several groups have fostered the concept of data sharing during the pandemic, including the International COVID-19 Data Alliance convened by Health Data Research UK, as well as the TransCelerate BioPharma Consortium and the Yale University Open Data Access Project, joined by the largest vaccine and drugmakers addressing the crisis.

Networks like these, which consolidate research and care through real-world analysis, will be key to future pandemic responses, Halford said.

"What the pandemic has taught everyone is you have to have integrated systems that can support a global response," Halford said. "Because if you don't have integrated systems, you don't have the data sharing, you don't have the patient communications that allows you to be proactive, and this pandemic is showing that we're on the back foot."

Handling both the adverse effects and real-world efficacy of drugs are the two areas where communication across the pharmaceutical industry should be improved, the WNS executive said. Halford pointed to reports that J&J and AstraZeneca PLC had held internal talks to discuss blood clots that occurred in a small subset of patients receiving their COVID-19 vaccines as an example of how attitudes in big pharma may be changing.

"I would not have guessed anything of that sort would have happened, because all of them are working in very, very hard silos," Singla said. "So one thing that has changed is there is an increasing acceptance to the fact that together, all the pharma companies, or perhaps all the stakeholders in the healthcare industry, can do better together than by themselves."

Pharmaceutical companies have already displayed an unprecedented level of cooperation when it comes to producing therapies to counter COVID-19. Switzerland's Novartis AG has committed to using its manufacturing capacity to produce vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech SE and CureVac NV, and CEO Vas Narasimhan said on an April 27 earnings call that the Swiss company will "continue to look to maximize the use of our facilities around the world."

Rare disease data sharing shows the way

One area that put this newfound spirit of collaboration into practice before the pandemic struck was chronic rare diseases. The Children's Tumor Foundation, for example, had already developed a portal for researchers to share data with a focus on the rare genetic disease neurofibromatosis.

The foundation's president, Annette Bakker, said she hopes the current global situation will lead the industry to collaborate further. The only approved drug for neurofibromatosis is Koselugo from AstraZeneca PLC, but the foundation has worked with the British company and outside researchers to encourage relationships and data sharing that can speed up development and treatment for patients, Bakker said.

The negotiation was not embraced right away, Bakker points out. "At first, we asked academic researchers to share their unpublished data, and they honestly looked at us as if we had seven heads."

However, the end result was an open science model within the neurofibromatosis research community, which included a data-sharing requirement in the foundation's funding agreements.

"I think as long as you ask companies to collaborate in what is called the pre-competitive space, you can get wonderful collaboration between companies," Bakker said, adding that the researchers do not share all of their competitive information, but enough to make progress possible.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made these data sharing portals more readily available as companies seek to address the health crisis, Bakker added.

"If we can keep all the good habits that were developed during COVID, in the sense of openness to collaborate and acceptance of novel clinical trials, I think this will accelerate going forward rather than slow down," Bakker said. "But I always say it's like democracy — you have to be very vigilant, because if not, it just will go away."