Hyderabad: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, technology has emerged at the forefront of fairness, accuracy, and effectiveness provision of health care, becoming an essential cog in the wheel of the Indian healthcare industry. We now live in a world where medical and technological advances go hand in hand, and healthcare cannot be imagined without the effective deployment of new age technology.
He Bio Asia 2023 The convention saw many discussions that were deliberate and informed about these medical advances facilitated by the IT sector. During his keynote speech at the 20th BioAsia in Hyderabad, Dr Vas NarasimhanCEO, Novartis described Norvatis’ journey to become a leader in the chemical industry as a lucky fluke in which they discovered chemicals essential to health through their dye manufacturing process. Comparing this Novartis journey to that of the pharmaceutical industry in general, Dr. Narasimhan said: “Looking at some of the early labs where we made some of the most fundamental discoveries in discovering that chemicals could affect human life, you can to see these serendipitous discoveries happen. It’s amazing to think that this was the kind of laboratory where we found the first medicines by accident, chemicals that could change the strength of certain diseases. And then you come to today, where we’re in a whole new world where we can fundamentally understanding the biology of the cell and reshaping that cell. That’s the story of our industry.”
Notifying that the Indian pharmaceutical industry is now moving from a world of chemistry to a world of biologics and cutting-edge science to transform the lives of patients, Narasimhan moved on to an educational presentation on siRNA technology, “siRNA is a natural feature that has inspired a new type of drug that targets RNA. RNA is a copy of a section of a DNA code. Cells use RNA to build proteins, the molecular machines that do a cell’s work, but some proteins can cause disease. This new type of drug aims to prevent disease-causing proteins from being produced. It’s like typing the protein code into the search and delete fields of a Word document, pressing enter, and deleting the instructions everywhere in the cell, which could stop the disease at its source.”
“siRNA is this technology that was pioneered in the 1980s by MIT scientists who later won the Nobel Prize. It was an understanding that RNA is not only translated into protein, but can modulate protein expression and silence it. It took 30 years of effort by many biotech companies and artists to bring siRNA therapies to life,” he added.
Conveying that Novartis has also successfully developed a siRNA drug, he shared: “We have one approved for cardiovascular disease. What makes these therapies so powerful is that instead of using oral medications that you have to take every day, you can take medications every six months and see dramatic reductions in things like cholesterol and, perhaps, in the future, blood pressure or other metrics. also. And you can imagine a world where you can give drugs very infrequently, sometimes once a year.” He added that the low cost of development, as siRNAs are small molecules that are chemically synthesized, makes it possible to address cardiovascular diseases worldwide on a scale never seen before.
Dr. Narasimhan also highlighted the achievements of the pharmaceutical industry that have enabled the possibility of eliminating malaria. Speaking about quartz technology to build anti-malarial drugs, he said: “The basis of understanding quartz comes from a 2,200-year-old ancient Chinese medicine text. Scientists who won the Nobel Prize spent decades studying these facts and found that there might be a source for understanding where we can find malaria drugs. This plan led to a revolution around the year 2000. Quartz technology helped manufacture antimalarial drugs on a large scale that create the possibility of curing malaria in five days.”
He added: “And for Novartis, we’ve reached over a billion doses of quartz provided to patients around the world at cost, without profit. Now 400 million children have been reached, showing that when we apply technological innovation to problems like malaria and then propose access paradigms, we can have a tremendous impact on public health.” In addition, he also noted that the work on leprosy is another great example of the power of technology-driven collaborative work across industries and communities. to make a big difference, highlighting how Novartis donates the global supply of leprosy drugs to the world for free.
Another example shared by Dr. Narasimhan to salute the industry is the therapeutic breakthrough that allows radiation to be directed to the exact location of cancer, allowing new paradigms in cancer therapy to open up. Highlighting the various forms of therapies, including immuno-oncology and CAR-T therapy, which have opened up new opportunities for the Indian healthcare industry’s response to cancer, he added: “I believe that in the coming decades we will continue to make breakthroughs and, hopefully, over time, get to a place where we can actually offer cures. And that is, of course, our long-term goal as a sector and as an industry.”
Directing the audience’s focus towards neurological diseases, he stated: “The third biggest cause of death is disability in many parts of the world on the planet. And we know that neurodegenerative diseases among the aging population will be a great challenge for society. Some of the most difficult areas of medicine to find new therapies are the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, ALS, and Parkinson’s. And while we have made progress, the progress has been challenging because understanding the actual biology of the human brain is a perplexing problem. Now, over time, our hope is that we can look again at new technologies to make progress.” Supporting his statement, Dr. Narasimhan highlighted how the use of multiple technologies can facilitate the response to neurological diseases. He gave an example of a structure-enhancing antibody linked to RNA therapy with the idea of targeting that RNA to specific brain tissue requiring therapeutic impact.
Dr. Narasimhan concluded his keynote address by expressing his hope that technological advances can open up new possibilities, whether in neurodegeneration or neuromuscular diseases, to address these diseases on a large scale and enable the next wave of advances in medicine.
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