Dose #5 Making of the Next-Gen Pharma Factory with Mike Walker (Microsoft)

In this episode of SCW for Pharma, Evren Ozkaya welcomes Mike Walker, Microsoft's Executive Director of Global Healthcare and Life Sciences Digital Strategy, to explore why pharma companies are slow in embracing digitalization and ways to help them catch up. They delve into strategies for adapting factories to the production of the growing market of emerging biologics, cell-gene therapies, and mRNA-based drugs, expected to reach nearly 1 trillion dollars by 2030. Mike estimates that only 1%-3% of companies fall under the fully digitized factory of the future category, highlighting the industry's digitization challenges. They explore factors contributing to this lag, including risk management, regulatory compliance, and entrenched status quo, exacerbated by uncertainty on where to begin digital transformation. Mike presents his top 10 supply chain trends for the life sciences industry and discusses the development of a digital ecosystem platform to enable various organizational departments to utilize high-quality data, feeding into high-performing AI and digital twin models.