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H1N1 (swine flu) & the R&D-based Pharmaceutical Industry

November 20, 2009 | 132 views

The R&D-based Pharmaceutical Industry's response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

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Kinapse

Kinapse provides expert advisory, capability building and operational services to the life sciences industries.

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PHARMA TECH

Use of AI: Reshaping the Pharmaceutical Industry

Article | July 12, 2022

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has counted on state-of-the-art technologies to ensure the market entry of safe and dependable medications. The recent pandemic has shown how important it is for drug companies to get new drugs and vaccines on the market as soon as possible. The incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has greatly benefited the consumer healthcare business and the pharmaceutical industry. These technologies have been indispensable in the field of augmented intelligence, where they are used for applications such as disease detection and diagnosis, research and development, drug manufacturing, and others. How is AI Being Used Across the Pharmaceutical Sector? AI and ML are finding a plethora of applications across the pharmaceutical sector, starting from managing the process of clinical trial databases to drug discovery and disease diagnosis and treatment. These advanced technologies have further gained immense popularity with the advent of the COVID pandemic and the race to discover effective vaccines. The top-level uses of AI across the pharmaceutical sector are as follows Personalized Treatment/ Digital Therapeutics – AI is extensively being used to identify and assist drug developers to provide reliable and accurate insights for developing personalized therapeutics. Disease Identification/ Suggestive Treatment – With robust assessing abilities, AI is finding applications for the diagnosis of diseases ranging from Covid-19 to oncology to degeneration in the eyes. Drug Discovery and Manufacturing – AI assists in screening and comparing the predicted success rate of drug compounds based on biological factors with the results of the initial screening process such as rapid RNA and DNA quantification. Clinical Trials – The technology helps in identifying the most suitable candidate for the clinical trial on the basis of disease conditions, history, and additional attributes covering infection rates, ethnicity, and demographics to study the impact of the drug. The Way Ahead With growing applications in the development of novel therapeutic medications, shifting patient inclination toward personalized medicines, and the introduction of advanced medical fields such as gene therapy, AI is estimated to transform the pharmaceutical

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RESEARCH

How Pharma Is Utilizing AI and Analytic Capabilities to Produce Positive Results

Article | September 1, 2021

Applications for AI are as diverse as the industries that employ them, and pharma has identified the particular varieties of AI that are most effective in attaining quicker, more fruitful results across a variety of business activities. In a world where every second counts, pharma and biotech businesses are under pressure to shorten the time to insight and deliver success. As a result, leading organizations quickly realize the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) as a crucial tool for advancing their operations. Leading pharma and biotech firms have realized the potential of AI and are utilizing it to boost productivity and innovation across the board, from production to drug discovery. Their procedures have significantly benefited from the application of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), and the results are only becoming better because AI gets stronger and "smarter" the more data it processes. Advantages Pharma Industry Can Leverage Increased effectiveness across the spectrum in the pharmaceutical industry Drug discovery accelerates Superior disease surveillance, detection, and prevention Clinical trials with lower risk Greater insight into the client NLP is used to turn clinical trial data that is text-intensive and highly categorized into the data utilized in machine learning (ML) models, allowing the computer system to apply patterns to the data and generate insights. Clinical trial data is structured and enriched, making it possible to analyze and visualize the data for use in successful plans and strategies for clinical trial design, manufacturing, marketing, and other areas. Faster time to insight and improved business outcomes are the end results. A particularly true principle of machine learning applications is that the outcomes from using AI applications are only as reliable as the data itself. The Pharma Intelligence offering, which combines high-quality, extensive data from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with advanced analytics and AI applications, has assisted customers with high-value products in resolving some of their most difficult key problems, including target prioritization, modalities innovation, competitive benchmarking, clinical trial design and deployment, and more.

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PHARMA TECH

Why Is Diversity of Thought Essential for Developing a Winning Strategy?

Article | July 20, 2022

In developing or evolving a strategy, there are key decision moments. Those are the moments where you are deciding where you need to focus, what you need to excel at to win there, and where and how to allocate resources to get to a point in the future. At these moments, it is the contest of ideas that matters. Having choices matters. Having a cross-functional team participating in the development of strategy is one way of ensuring that you are going to be more successful at generating choices before you start making choices. What Is a Cross-functional Team? A cross-functional team is a collection of individuals with varied skillsets from different areas of a business collaborating to achieve a common goal. Why Are Cross-functional Teams Essential for Business Success? Having this diverse set of minds analysing the situation, considering the big picture and the organisation’s capabilities, and the needs of all stakeholders, inspires teams to think about the choices they have differently and more creatively. For example, in a pharmaceutical setting, the medical affairs team brings knowledge of the data, unmet needs, and insight into clinical practice. Access and reimbursement teams identify the right data and take the lead in building that value story to accelerate market access and product uptake. It is incumbent upon commercial to hear their ideas, obtain their perspective and secure their alignment to all strategy decisions. Cross-functional collaboration can help break down silos. Research suggests that working in silos and not sharing data with team members from other departments can cost a company close to $8,000 per day in wasteful expenses. Time is widely recognised as a scarce resource: we need quick access to accurate and real-time insights to make effective business decisions. Real time insight will come from those closest to the customer, so it is important for cross-functional members from different geographies to participate in the development of strategy. Improved insight is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. One single version of the truth is what is required for the right narrative to take place. The right narrative will lead to the right decisions. One single version of the truth is more easily achieved by cross-functional team members working closely together. Better Innovation & Creativity: Individuals with diverse skillsets often explore a problem in different ways. When different people working in different capacities come together, they think outside the box to significantly improve outcomes. It is a great way to come up with concepts that distinguish companies from their competitors. Achieving alignment with strategy across functions and geographies: Today, businesses are moving faster than ever and organisations are seeing possible competitors in areas they never knew existed before. With so much choice about where to focus, you really want your workforce to align around one strategy. Underperformance is inevitable if everybody is off working in ten different directions. Improving the customer experience: Creating an effective customer experience is about more than just ensuring your customers receive the products and services they desire in a timely and efficient manner. It’s also about creating touchpoints with real people who can organically evangelise and grow your brand through their social media and offline interactions with friends and family. Your customers are engaging with multiple communication channels– official websites, social platforms, virtual platforms, medical science liaisons, sales reps, and more. Everyone needs to be aware of, and understand, the moments that matter to your customer and the business along that customer journey and how they contribute to delivering that positive experience. This is more likely to be achieved with a cross-functional approach to strategy development. Business Agility: Cross-functional teams are typically small, adaptable, and flexible. Such teams can move faster as they don’t have to wait and rely on other departments or external sources. They can help in tackling any silo mentality and bridge gaps between team members. They can come together to consider new information and/or changes to adapt the strategy if necessary and/or react to any setbacks immediately. They are better placed to make decisions when problem-solving amidst uncertainty. In summary, the rapidly changing environment and new information requires medical affairs, along with access and reimbursement and commercial, to work together, to ensure that patient’s benefit from the value of new innovative therapies. Companies stand a better chance of creating a winning strategy if it is created by a cross-functional and geographically diverse team. With every team member bringing their abilities and knowledge to the table, the strategy over time can only move from strength to strength. However, if not supported correctly, a cross-functional team working on strategy can be dysfunctional and chaotic, and result in a laborious and time-consuming approach to strategy development. Digital strategy platforms such as Nmblr offer an inclusive and structured process to facilitate a strategy discussion and allow people to bring forward ideas. They do this by: working against silos – the structure provided, levels the playing field. The guidance provided equips people from different disciplines to contribute to the conversation.

Read More
PHARMA TECH

Modern Phenotypic Drug Discovery

Article | June 2, 2022

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery makes these points well. It goes over historical and recent successes of the phenotypic approach, and discusses some areas that it's opening up for discussion and research. One of these is the long-vexed question of polypharmacology: what do you do when your active compound doesn't seem to have a single target, but rather hits a whole list of stuff at varying degrees of potency? Seen from a pure target-based viewpoint, this is a failure, and you'd better start working on something else. But to be honest, there are a lot of drugs out there (and not all of them ancient legacy compounds by any means) that work this way, even if their developers didn't think so at the time. So it's not to be disparaged on principle, but that said, it's still a difficult area to make progress in because of all the variables. A good enough phenotypic hit, though, makes its own case that it's worthy of further investigation and development, even if it's not "clean" by rigorous target-based standards. But as always, your phenotypic screen had better be a good one. That is, it had really better model the human disease in a useful way, and have a good signal/noise. The authors note that you're much better off with assays that involve a gain-of-function/gain-of-signal readout, as opposed to ones that could read out just through cellular stress or cytotoxicity, which is an invitation to chase your tail. Another area the paper brings up is searching lower-molecular-weight compounds than are usually screened, down to fragment-sized. There are quite a few useful drugs out there with really low molecular weights - ibuprofen, aspirin, metformin, dimethyl fumarate, lacosamide and more - and any screening program would be happy to have discovered something as useful as those. As the authors note, hits like these in phenotypic screens might be another case of polypharmacology, or they might be hitting pathways whose "tone" we have not understood well (and for which micromolar inhibitors might work out just fine). At any rate, there might be an opportunity for fragment phenotypic screening, and even of covalent fragments (which will call for even more attention to the validity of the underlying screening model, I'd say). The paper discusses the question of target ID, which for most phenotypic programs feels like a natural progression. Most of us are innately biased towards thinking in terms of drug targets, so when a phenotypic compound emerges we want to know what it's "really" doing. And most of the time, there is such a target in there somewhere, although finding it can be quite a haul. I know of several compounds that have been kicking around for years that are obviously doing something in the assays, but no one has ever been able to pin down quite what that is! This paper makes the case for getting out of a binary mindset for target identification. They point out, correctly, that target ID is a means to an end, and that you do not actually need to identify your target to go on to clinical trials and go to the FDA for approval. I always find it surprising to find how many people are surprised by that, but it's true. You also need to realize that knowing a target may not tell you nearly as much as you would want about a compound's mechanism of action, if your new target lands in the middle of a bunch of not-well-worked-out biology. There's a good case to be made that modern chemical biology and imaging techniques have made it easier to progress things, even if you're not quite sure how they're working. We can extract huge amounts of information about the cellular effects of a given compound, and if you do a good job of matching this against a closely related structure that's phenotypically inactive, you can make a lot of headway. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't bother trying to find the target - as mentioned, this is a great way to expand the knowledge of the underlying disease, and can lead to other new programs spinning off of the phenotypic effort. But it does mean that you shouldn't freeze in fear if you don't have a target to point to. The FDA wants to see safety and efficacy, and that's what we should want to see, too, for starters. But as the paper notes at the end, phenotypic screening is going to advance at the pace of good model development. Many of these same chem-bio tools can be brought to bear on this question as well, along with advances in cell culture, organoids, and other new assay technologies. You're not going to be able (realistically) to recapitulate all the features of a human disease, so you will probably find yourself concentrating on certain features that you can make the case for driving a project on. I was very happy to see this paper reference Jack Scannell's paper on translatability (blogged about here), because its point is crucial to the whole phenotypic screening endeavour. If your underlying assay is flawed, there is nothing you can do in any other part of the project to make up for it. A poorly translatable assay is a sign that you should spend your time trying to fix it, or to go do something entirely different instead. It is not a sign that you should just keep on going, because "it's the best thing we've got". If it isn't good enough, it isn't good enough. I don't get to quote A. E. Houseman much around here, but he's right: "The toil of all that be. Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea. And still the sea is salt." If you don't fix your assay up front, you are raining into the sea.

Read More
PHARMA TECH

Use of AI: Reshaping the Pharmaceutical Industry

Article | July 12, 2022

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has counted on state-of-the-art technologies to ensure the market entry of safe and dependable medications. The recent pandemic has shown how important it is for drug companies to get new drugs and vaccines on the market as soon as possible. The incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has greatly benefited the consumer healthcare business and the pharmaceutical industry. These technologies have been indispensable in the field of augmented intelligence, where they are used for applications such as disease detection and diagnosis, research and development, drug manufacturing, and others. How is AI Being Used Across the Pharmaceutical Sector? AI and ML are finding a plethora of applications across the pharmaceutical sector, starting from managing the process of clinical trial databases to drug discovery and disease diagnosis and treatment. These advanced technologies have further gained immense popularity with the advent of the COVID pandemic and the race to discover effective vaccines. The top-level uses of AI across the pharmaceutical sector are as follows Personalized Treatment/ Digital Therapeutics – AI is extensively being used to identify and assist drug developers to provide reliable and accurate insights for developing personalized therapeutics. Disease Identification/ Suggestive Treatment – With robust assessing abilities, AI is finding applications for the diagnosis of diseases ranging from Covid-19 to oncology to degeneration in the eyes. Drug Discovery and Manufacturing – AI assists in screening and comparing the predicted success rate of drug compounds based on biological factors with the results of the initial screening process such as rapid RNA and DNA quantification. Clinical Trials – The technology helps in identifying the most suitable candidate for the clinical trial on the basis of disease conditions, history, and additional attributes covering infection rates, ethnicity, and demographics to study the impact of the drug. The Way Ahead With growing applications in the development of novel therapeutic medications, shifting patient inclination toward personalized medicines, and the introduction of advanced medical fields such as gene therapy, AI is estimated to transform the pharmaceutical

Read More
RESEARCH

Bridging the Gaps in Complex Patient Journeys by Enriching Data

Article | September 1, 2021

Applications for AI are as diverse as the industries that employ them, and pharma has identified the particular varieties of AI that are most effective in attaining quicker, more fruitful results across a variety of business activities. In a world where every second counts, pharma and biotech businesses are under pressure to shorten the time to insight and deliver success. As a result, leading organizations quickly realize the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) as a crucial tool for advancing their operations. Leading pharma and biotech firms have realized the potential of AI and are utilizing it to boost productivity and innovation across the board, from production to drug discovery. Their procedures have significantly benefited from the application of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), and the results are only becoming better because AI gets stronger and "smarter" the more data it processes. Advantages Pharma Industry Can Leverage Increased effectiveness across the spectrum in the pharmaceutical industry Drug discovery accelerates Superior disease surveillance, detection, and prevention Clinical trials with lower risk Greater insight into the client NLP is used to turn clinical trial data that is text-intensive and highly categorized into the data utilized in machine learning (ML) models, allowing the computer system to apply patterns to the data and generate insights. Clinical trial data is structured and enriched, making it possible to analyze and visualize the data for use in successful plans and strategies for clinical trial design, manufacturing, marketing, and other areas. Faster time to insight and improved business outcomes are the end results. A particularly true principle of machine learning applications is that the outcomes from using AI applications are only as reliable as the data itself. The Pharma Intelligence offering, which combines high-quality, extensive data from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with advanced analytics and AI applications, has assisted customers with high-value products in resolving some of their most difficult key problems, including target prioritization, modalities innovation, competitive benchmarking, clinical trial design and deployment, and more.

Read More
PHARMA TECH

Precision Medicine: New Horizons in Pharmaceuticals

Article | July 20, 2022

In developing or evolving a strategy, there are key decision moments. Those are the moments where you are deciding where you need to focus, what you need to excel at to win there, and where and how to allocate resources to get to a point in the future. At these moments, it is the contest of ideas that matters. Having choices matters. Having a cross-functional team participating in the development of strategy is one way of ensuring that you are going to be more successful at generating choices before you start making choices. What Is a Cross-functional Team? A cross-functional team is a collection of individuals with varied skillsets from different areas of a business collaborating to achieve a common goal. Why Are Cross-functional Teams Essential for Business Success? Having this diverse set of minds analysing the situation, considering the big picture and the organisation’s capabilities, and the needs of all stakeholders, inspires teams to think about the choices they have differently and more creatively. For example, in a pharmaceutical setting, the medical affairs team brings knowledge of the data, unmet needs, and insight into clinical practice. Access and reimbursement teams identify the right data and take the lead in building that value story to accelerate market access and product uptake. It is incumbent upon commercial to hear their ideas, obtain their perspective and secure their alignment to all strategy decisions. Cross-functional collaboration can help break down silos. Research suggests that working in silos and not sharing data with team members from other departments can cost a company close to $8,000 per day in wasteful expenses. Time is widely recognised as a scarce resource: we need quick access to accurate and real-time insights to make effective business decisions. Real time insight will come from those closest to the customer, so it is important for cross-functional members from different geographies to participate in the development of strategy. Improved insight is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. One single version of the truth is what is required for the right narrative to take place. The right narrative will lead to the right decisions. One single version of the truth is more easily achieved by cross-functional team members working closely together. Better Innovation & Creativity: Individuals with diverse skillsets often explore a problem in different ways. When different people working in different capacities come together, they think outside the box to significantly improve outcomes. It is a great way to come up with concepts that distinguish companies from their competitors. Achieving alignment with strategy across functions and geographies: Today, businesses are moving faster than ever and organisations are seeing possible competitors in areas they never knew existed before. With so much choice about where to focus, you really want your workforce to align around one strategy. Underperformance is inevitable if everybody is off working in ten different directions. Improving the customer experience: Creating an effective customer experience is about more than just ensuring your customers receive the products and services they desire in a timely and efficient manner. It’s also about creating touchpoints with real people who can organically evangelise and grow your brand through their social media and offline interactions with friends and family. Your customers are engaging with multiple communication channels– official websites, social platforms, virtual platforms, medical science liaisons, sales reps, and more. Everyone needs to be aware of, and understand, the moments that matter to your customer and the business along that customer journey and how they contribute to delivering that positive experience. This is more likely to be achieved with a cross-functional approach to strategy development. Business Agility: Cross-functional teams are typically small, adaptable, and flexible. Such teams can move faster as they don’t have to wait and rely on other departments or external sources. They can help in tackling any silo mentality and bridge gaps between team members. They can come together to consider new information and/or changes to adapt the strategy if necessary and/or react to any setbacks immediately. They are better placed to make decisions when problem-solving amidst uncertainty. In summary, the rapidly changing environment and new information requires medical affairs, along with access and reimbursement and commercial, to work together, to ensure that patient’s benefit from the value of new innovative therapies. Companies stand a better chance of creating a winning strategy if it is created by a cross-functional and geographically diverse team. With every team member bringing their abilities and knowledge to the table, the strategy over time can only move from strength to strength. However, if not supported correctly, a cross-functional team working on strategy can be dysfunctional and chaotic, and result in a laborious and time-consuming approach to strategy development. Digital strategy platforms such as Nmblr offer an inclusive and structured process to facilitate a strategy discussion and allow people to bring forward ideas. They do this by: working against silos – the structure provided, levels the playing field. The guidance provided equips people from different disciplines to contribute to the conversation.

Read More
PHARMA TECH

Modern Phenotypic Drug Discovery

Article | June 2, 2022

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery makes these points well. It goes over historical and recent successes of the phenotypic approach, and discusses some areas that it's opening up for discussion and research. One of these is the long-vexed question of polypharmacology: what do you do when your active compound doesn't seem to have a single target, but rather hits a whole list of stuff at varying degrees of potency? Seen from a pure target-based viewpoint, this is a failure, and you'd better start working on something else. But to be honest, there are a lot of drugs out there (and not all of them ancient legacy compounds by any means) that work this way, even if their developers didn't think so at the time. So it's not to be disparaged on principle, but that said, it's still a difficult area to make progress in because of all the variables. A good enough phenotypic hit, though, makes its own case that it's worthy of further investigation and development, even if it's not "clean" by rigorous target-based standards. But as always, your phenotypic screen had better be a good one. That is, it had really better model the human disease in a useful way, and have a good signal/noise. The authors note that you're much better off with assays that involve a gain-of-function/gain-of-signal readout, as opposed to ones that could read out just through cellular stress or cytotoxicity, which is an invitation to chase your tail. Another area the paper brings up is searching lower-molecular-weight compounds than are usually screened, down to fragment-sized. There are quite a few useful drugs out there with really low molecular weights - ibuprofen, aspirin, metformin, dimethyl fumarate, lacosamide and more - and any screening program would be happy to have discovered something as useful as those. As the authors note, hits like these in phenotypic screens might be another case of polypharmacology, or they might be hitting pathways whose "tone" we have not understood well (and for which micromolar inhibitors might work out just fine). At any rate, there might be an opportunity for fragment phenotypic screening, and even of covalent fragments (which will call for even more attention to the validity of the underlying screening model, I'd say). The paper discusses the question of target ID, which for most phenotypic programs feels like a natural progression. Most of us are innately biased towards thinking in terms of drug targets, so when a phenotypic compound emerges we want to know what it's "really" doing. And most of the time, there is such a target in there somewhere, although finding it can be quite a haul. I know of several compounds that have been kicking around for years that are obviously doing something in the assays, but no one has ever been able to pin down quite what that is! This paper makes the case for getting out of a binary mindset for target identification. They point out, correctly, that target ID is a means to an end, and that you do not actually need to identify your target to go on to clinical trials and go to the FDA for approval. I always find it surprising to find how many people are surprised by that, but it's true. You also need to realize that knowing a target may not tell you nearly as much as you would want about a compound's mechanism of action, if your new target lands in the middle of a bunch of not-well-worked-out biology. There's a good case to be made that modern chemical biology and imaging techniques have made it easier to progress things, even if you're not quite sure how they're working. We can extract huge amounts of information about the cellular effects of a given compound, and if you do a good job of matching this against a closely related structure that's phenotypically inactive, you can make a lot of headway. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't bother trying to find the target - as mentioned, this is a great way to expand the knowledge of the underlying disease, and can lead to other new programs spinning off of the phenotypic effort. But it does mean that you shouldn't freeze in fear if you don't have a target to point to. The FDA wants to see safety and efficacy, and that's what we should want to see, too, for starters. But as the paper notes at the end, phenotypic screening is going to advance at the pace of good model development. Many of these same chem-bio tools can be brought to bear on this question as well, along with advances in cell culture, organoids, and other new assay technologies. You're not going to be able (realistically) to recapitulate all the features of a human disease, so you will probably find yourself concentrating on certain features that you can make the case for driving a project on. I was very happy to see this paper reference Jack Scannell's paper on translatability (blogged about here), because its point is crucial to the whole phenotypic screening endeavour. If your underlying assay is flawed, there is nothing you can do in any other part of the project to make up for it. A poorly translatable assay is a sign that you should spend your time trying to fix it, or to go do something entirely different instead. It is not a sign that you should just keep on going, because "it's the best thing we've got". If it isn't good enough, it isn't good enough. I don't get to quote A. E. Houseman much around here, but he's right: "The toil of all that be. Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea. And still the sea is salt." If you don't fix your assay up front, you are raining into the sea.

Read More
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Kinapse

Kinapse provides expert advisory, capability building and operational services to the life sciences industries.

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Verizon Business Selected to Transform Astellas Pharma’s Global Network Infrastructure

Verizon Sourcing LLC | August 10, 2022

Verizon Business has been selected to manage Astellas Pharma Inc’s global network infrastructure. The network transformation will enable Astellas to harness advanced technologies to help reduce drug development timelines, healthcare costs and drive new revenue opportunities for the Japanese pharmaceutical multinational. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Astellas is a global pharmaceutical company involved in the research, development, manufacture, and marketing of innovative new drugs under the vision of “Stand on the forefront of healthcare change to turn innovative science into VALUE for patients”. The company employs 14,000 employees worldwide. The company has identified digital transformation as a key driver of its business growth and began the search for a global partner to transform all aspects of its global technology infrastructure including building, designing and executing a next-generation secure network. In particular, Astellas was looking for a scalable and predictable platform that could seamlessly manage tens of thousands of devices and endpoints across Astellas’ 70+ global locations across a virtualized multi-sourced environment. Verizon’s relationship with Astellas stretches back more than a decade. In 2016, Astellas successfully deployed Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect solution to provide a high-bandwidth secure connection to its Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure cloud services. Verizon’s current remit includes the build and deployment of Astellas’ global integrated network with a full suite of managed services, including Managed Wide Area Network, Local Area Network, Managed Security Services Secure Gateway, Zero Trust Network Access and Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service. “From R&D to sales, we are seeing enormous amounts of data and intelligence flow through our business, across our 70 locations around the world. We want to ensure that we have a future-proof network in order to utilize cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and robotics to make data-driven decisions to deliver better value for our patients. Our network transformation will underpin the next phase of our growth.” Shinya Suda, Senior Vice President, Information Systems, Astellas “The network is transformative in its ability to enable innovation and growth and Astellas is changing the way they are using the tools at their disposal to completely revolutionize their business. This is truly a watershed moment for the pharmaceutical industry as companies grapple with the pressures of reducing time and costs for the development of drugs while improving patient care and value. We’re proud to have been a part of Astellas’ growth journey for more than a decade,” said Robert Le Busque, Regional Vice-President, Verizon Business Group, Asia Pacific. Today’s announcement builds on the company’s network-as-a-service foundation and supports its private networks, mobile edge compute and business solutions vectors of growth. Verizon Communications Inc. was formed on June 30, 2000 and is one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon generated revenues of $133.6 billion in 2021. The company offers data, video and voice services and solutions on its award-winning networks and platforms, delivering on customers’ demand for mobility, reliable network connectivity, security and control. VERIZON’S ONLINE MEDIA CENTER News releases, stories, media contacts and other resources are available at verizon.com/news. News releases are also available through an RSS feed.

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Catalent to Acquire Metrics Contract Services for $475 Million to Expand High-Potent Capabilities and Oral Development and Manufacturing Capacity

Catalent, Inc. | August 10, 2022

Catalent, Inc. the global leader in enabling biopharma, cell, gene, and consumer health partners to optimize development, launch, and supply of better patient treatments across multiple modalities, today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Metrics Contract Services a full-service specialty Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization with a facility in Greenville, North Carolina, for $475 million from Mayne Pharma Group Limited. Upon completion, the acquisition will strengthen Catalent’s capabilities in integrated oral solid formulation development, manufacturing, and packaging to help customers simplify and accelerate their programs, while also expanding Catalent's capacity to handle highly potent compounds. The 333,000 square-foot Greenville facility features comprehensive capabilities to accelerate and de-risk customer programs from early development through commercial launch through a streamlined one-site solution. Over the past five years, the facility has seen more than $100 million in capital improvements and now includes 16 manufacturing suites, with 11 designed to handle highly potent compounds, as well as two packaging lines that can support a large variety of development and commercial supply programs. The facility’s estimated annual production capacity exceeds one billion oral solid dose units. “This acquisition will further expand Catalent’s ability to meet our customers’ expectations in fast-growing areas of the business and patient need. The experienced team and consistently improved, state-of-the-art facility in Greenville will provide Catalent’s customers with immediate, fit-for-scale capacity for in-demand highly potent drugs and other oral solid small-to-mid-size batch needs. This capacity is particularly important for customers with R&D pipelines featuring accelerated, orphan, and rare disease programs for oncology and other important therapeutic areas,” said Dr. Aris Gennadios, Group President of Catalent’s Pharma & Consumer Health segment. “Over the past several years, Metrics has undergone a period of transformational change to expand its footprint and service offering, becoming a global end-to-end novel oral solid CDMO. Catalent, a global leader in advanced drug development and manufacturing, is well-positioned to continue to invest in and accelerate the growth of Metrics and we believe this transaction will be extremely positive for our Greenville team and customers,” Scott Richards, Chief Executive Officer of Mayne Pharma The new facility will seamlessly integrate into Catalent’s industry-leading oral development and manufacturing network, which includes flagship sites for large-scale and controlled release oral solids manufacturing in Winchester, Kentucky; softgel development and manufacturing in St. Petersburg, Florida; and additional facilities with bioavailability enhancement technologies and complex oral solids manufacturing platforms. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of this calendar year, subject to customary closing conditions, and the entire team of over 400 employees will join Catalent. Mayne Pharma and Catalent have also agreed on the terms of a long-term supply agreement whereby the Greenville facility will continue to manufacture multiple Mayne Pharma products. Catalent will pay the purchase price for this all-cash acquisition using a combination of cash on hand, existing credit facilities, and, depending on market conditions, potentially new debt financing. The closing of the acquisition is not contingent on any financing activity. ABOUT CATALENT Catalent, Inc. an S&P 500® company, is the global leader in enabling pharma, biotech, and consumer health partners to optimize product development, launch, and full life-cycle supply for patients around the world. With broad and deep scale and expertise in development sciences, delivery technologies, and multi-modality manufacturing, Catalent is the industry’s preferred partner for personalized medicines, consumer health brand extensions, and blockbuster drugs. Catalent helps accelerate over 1,000 partner programs and launch over 150 new products every year. Its flexible manufacturing platforms at over 50 global sites supply over 70 billion doses of nearly 7,000 products to over 1,000 customers annually. Catalent’s expert workforce of approximately 19,000 includes more than 2,500 scientists and technicians. Headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey, the company generated $4 billion in revenue in its 2021 fiscal year. ABOUT METRICS CONTRACT SERVICES Metrics Contract Services, a division of Mayne Pharma Group Limited, is a full-service pharmaceutical development and manufacturing organization serving clients worldwide delivering proven scientific and operational excellence for novel oral dosage forms. Metrics provides formulation development, analytical testing and commercial manufacturing from its single-campus facility in Greenville, North Carolina

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Pharma Tech Holdings SA Obtains a Capital Commitment Agreement of CHF 30 million from Global Investor LDA Capital

Pharma Tech | August 09, 2022

Pharma Tech Holding SA announced it has secured a CHF 30 million investment to support its portfolio investments from LDA Capital Ltd, a global investment group with expertise in cross border transactions including the agriculture, Agri-tech, and CBD industries. Established in 2019, PTH is a Swiss based holding company, which invests into innovative businesses with high technological value and scalability potential, mainly in Switzerland and Europe, with a focus on the health-tech, Agri-tech, and functional food. This investment will allow PTH to mainly invest and support its portfolio company Blue Sky Swisse SA a JV between PTH and listed company IGEA PHARMA NV IGPH - ISIN NL0012768675. BSS focuses on the extraction of natural active principles from vegetable matrices, vegetable waste, and renewable sources to deliver B2B products under the form of CBD oil, Terpenes and Waxes. The factory located in Biasca, will be built to the state of art of extraction technology by super critical CO2 and will be energy self-sufficient through the use of solar photovoltaic panels and district heating. BSS will grant for highest CBD quality also due to a proprietary extraction process, starting from the farming performed under strict control and culminating with the immediate freezing of the flowers after harvest, with the target to also sell “all natural” formulations to increase bioavailability thus enhancing the possible applications. Last, but not least, BSS will invest in the agricultural raw material chain and will create an aeroponic green house in Ticino, to deliver a high quality GMP Pharmaceutical CBD oil. LDA Capital agreed to commit an amount of up to CHF 30 million in cash within a maximum of three years. This Capital Commitment will be released based on drawdowns by PTH, that PTH has the right to exercise at its sole discretion. “We’re thrilled with this partnership and are so glad that LDA Capital recognizes the value of PTH and its portfolio company, with the aim of creating one of the most innovative hub for health-tech, agri-tech and functional food,” Sabina Del Nigro, CEO at PTH About Pharma Tech Holding Pharma Tech Holding SA is a holding company based in Lugano, Switzerland, which invests into innovative businesses with high technological value and scalability potential, mainly in Switzerland and Europe, with a focus on the health-tech, Agri-tech, and functional food. About LDA Capital LDA Capital is a global alternative investment group with expertise in cross border transactions worldwide. Our team has dedicated their careers to international & cross border opportunities having collectively executed over 250 transactions in both the public and private middle markets across 43 countries with aggregate transaction values of over US$11 billion.

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Verizon Business Selected to Transform Astellas Pharma’s Global Network Infrastructure

Verizon Sourcing LLC | August 10, 2022

Verizon Business has been selected to manage Astellas Pharma Inc’s global network infrastructure. The network transformation will enable Astellas to harness advanced technologies to help reduce drug development timelines, healthcare costs and drive new revenue opportunities for the Japanese pharmaceutical multinational. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Astellas is a global pharmaceutical company involved in the research, development, manufacture, and marketing of innovative new drugs under the vision of “Stand on the forefront of healthcare change to turn innovative science into VALUE for patients”. The company employs 14,000 employees worldwide. The company has identified digital transformation as a key driver of its business growth and began the search for a global partner to transform all aspects of its global technology infrastructure including building, designing and executing a next-generation secure network. In particular, Astellas was looking for a scalable and predictable platform that could seamlessly manage tens of thousands of devices and endpoints across Astellas’ 70+ global locations across a virtualized multi-sourced environment. Verizon’s relationship with Astellas stretches back more than a decade. In 2016, Astellas successfully deployed Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect solution to provide a high-bandwidth secure connection to its Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure cloud services. Verizon’s current remit includes the build and deployment of Astellas’ global integrated network with a full suite of managed services, including Managed Wide Area Network, Local Area Network, Managed Security Services Secure Gateway, Zero Trust Network Access and Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service. “From R&D to sales, we are seeing enormous amounts of data and intelligence flow through our business, across our 70 locations around the world. We want to ensure that we have a future-proof network in order to utilize cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and robotics to make data-driven decisions to deliver better value for our patients. Our network transformation will underpin the next phase of our growth.” Shinya Suda, Senior Vice President, Information Systems, Astellas “The network is transformative in its ability to enable innovation and growth and Astellas is changing the way they are using the tools at their disposal to completely revolutionize their business. This is truly a watershed moment for the pharmaceutical industry as companies grapple with the pressures of reducing time and costs for the development of drugs while improving patient care and value. We’re proud to have been a part of Astellas’ growth journey for more than a decade,” said Robert Le Busque, Regional Vice-President, Verizon Business Group, Asia Pacific. Today’s announcement builds on the company’s network-as-a-service foundation and supports its private networks, mobile edge compute and business solutions vectors of growth. Verizon Communications Inc. was formed on June 30, 2000 and is one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon generated revenues of $133.6 billion in 2021. The company offers data, video and voice services and solutions on its award-winning networks and platforms, delivering on customers’ demand for mobility, reliable network connectivity, security and control. VERIZON’S ONLINE MEDIA CENTER News releases, stories, media contacts and other resources are available at verizon.com/news. News releases are also available through an RSS feed.

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Catalent to Acquire Metrics Contract Services for $475 Million to Expand High-Potent Capabilities and Oral Development and Manufacturing Capacity

Catalent, Inc. | August 10, 2022

Catalent, Inc. the global leader in enabling biopharma, cell, gene, and consumer health partners to optimize development, launch, and supply of better patient treatments across multiple modalities, today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Metrics Contract Services a full-service specialty Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization with a facility in Greenville, North Carolina, for $475 million from Mayne Pharma Group Limited. Upon completion, the acquisition will strengthen Catalent’s capabilities in integrated oral solid formulation development, manufacturing, and packaging to help customers simplify and accelerate their programs, while also expanding Catalent's capacity to handle highly potent compounds. The 333,000 square-foot Greenville facility features comprehensive capabilities to accelerate and de-risk customer programs from early development through commercial launch through a streamlined one-site solution. Over the past five years, the facility has seen more than $100 million in capital improvements and now includes 16 manufacturing suites, with 11 designed to handle highly potent compounds, as well as two packaging lines that can support a large variety of development and commercial supply programs. The facility’s estimated annual production capacity exceeds one billion oral solid dose units. “This acquisition will further expand Catalent’s ability to meet our customers’ expectations in fast-growing areas of the business and patient need. The experienced team and consistently improved, state-of-the-art facility in Greenville will provide Catalent’s customers with immediate, fit-for-scale capacity for in-demand highly potent drugs and other oral solid small-to-mid-size batch needs. This capacity is particularly important for customers with R&D pipelines featuring accelerated, orphan, and rare disease programs for oncology and other important therapeutic areas,” said Dr. Aris Gennadios, Group President of Catalent’s Pharma & Consumer Health segment. “Over the past several years, Metrics has undergone a period of transformational change to expand its footprint and service offering, becoming a global end-to-end novel oral solid CDMO. Catalent, a global leader in advanced drug development and manufacturing, is well-positioned to continue to invest in and accelerate the growth of Metrics and we believe this transaction will be extremely positive for our Greenville team and customers,” Scott Richards, Chief Executive Officer of Mayne Pharma The new facility will seamlessly integrate into Catalent’s industry-leading oral development and manufacturing network, which includes flagship sites for large-scale and controlled release oral solids manufacturing in Winchester, Kentucky; softgel development and manufacturing in St. Petersburg, Florida; and additional facilities with bioavailability enhancement technologies and complex oral solids manufacturing platforms. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of this calendar year, subject to customary closing conditions, and the entire team of over 400 employees will join Catalent. Mayne Pharma and Catalent have also agreed on the terms of a long-term supply agreement whereby the Greenville facility will continue to manufacture multiple Mayne Pharma products. Catalent will pay the purchase price for this all-cash acquisition using a combination of cash on hand, existing credit facilities, and, depending on market conditions, potentially new debt financing. The closing of the acquisition is not contingent on any financing activity. ABOUT CATALENT Catalent, Inc. an S&P 500® company, is the global leader in enabling pharma, biotech, and consumer health partners to optimize product development, launch, and full life-cycle supply for patients around the world. With broad and deep scale and expertise in development sciences, delivery technologies, and multi-modality manufacturing, Catalent is the industry’s preferred partner for personalized medicines, consumer health brand extensions, and blockbuster drugs. Catalent helps accelerate over 1,000 partner programs and launch over 150 new products every year. Its flexible manufacturing platforms at over 50 global sites supply over 70 billion doses of nearly 7,000 products to over 1,000 customers annually. Catalent’s expert workforce of approximately 19,000 includes more than 2,500 scientists and technicians. Headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey, the company generated $4 billion in revenue in its 2021 fiscal year. ABOUT METRICS CONTRACT SERVICES Metrics Contract Services, a division of Mayne Pharma Group Limited, is a full-service pharmaceutical development and manufacturing organization serving clients worldwide delivering proven scientific and operational excellence for novel oral dosage forms. Metrics provides formulation development, analytical testing and commercial manufacturing from its single-campus facility in Greenville, North Carolina

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BUSINESS INSIGHTS

Pharma Tech Holdings SA Obtains a Capital Commitment Agreement of CHF 30 million from Global Investor LDA Capital

Pharma Tech | August 09, 2022

Pharma Tech Holding SA announced it has secured a CHF 30 million investment to support its portfolio investments from LDA Capital Ltd, a global investment group with expertise in cross border transactions including the agriculture, Agri-tech, and CBD industries. Established in 2019, PTH is a Swiss based holding company, which invests into innovative businesses with high technological value and scalability potential, mainly in Switzerland and Europe, with a focus on the health-tech, Agri-tech, and functional food. This investment will allow PTH to mainly invest and support its portfolio company Blue Sky Swisse SA a JV between PTH and listed company IGEA PHARMA NV IGPH - ISIN NL0012768675. BSS focuses on the extraction of natural active principles from vegetable matrices, vegetable waste, and renewable sources to deliver B2B products under the form of CBD oil, Terpenes and Waxes. The factory located in Biasca, will be built to the state of art of extraction technology by super critical CO2 and will be energy self-sufficient through the use of solar photovoltaic panels and district heating. BSS will grant for highest CBD quality also due to a proprietary extraction process, starting from the farming performed under strict control and culminating with the immediate freezing of the flowers after harvest, with the target to also sell “all natural” formulations to increase bioavailability thus enhancing the possible applications. Last, but not least, BSS will invest in the agricultural raw material chain and will create an aeroponic green house in Ticino, to deliver a high quality GMP Pharmaceutical CBD oil. LDA Capital agreed to commit an amount of up to CHF 30 million in cash within a maximum of three years. This Capital Commitment will be released based on drawdowns by PTH, that PTH has the right to exercise at its sole discretion. “We’re thrilled with this partnership and are so glad that LDA Capital recognizes the value of PTH and its portfolio company, with the aim of creating one of the most innovative hub for health-tech, agri-tech and functional food,” Sabina Del Nigro, CEO at PTH About Pharma Tech Holding Pharma Tech Holding SA is a holding company based in Lugano, Switzerland, which invests into innovative businesses with high technological value and scalability potential, mainly in Switzerland and Europe, with a focus on the health-tech, Agri-tech, and functional food. About LDA Capital LDA Capital is a global alternative investment group with expertise in cross border transactions worldwide. Our team has dedicated their careers to international & cross border opportunities having collectively executed over 250 transactions in both the public and private middle markets across 43 countries with aggregate transaction values of over US$11 billion.

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