The New Generation of Visibility

The center of gravity of the global pharmaceutical industry is shifting. With Asia emerging as a new hub for bioscience and technology, the focus no longer lies solely in the American and European regions.

Asia is an attractive region for a number of reasons. Asian economies are prospering, as operational costs remain an attractive incentive for investors. Home to more than three billion people, Asia has the potential to claim a larger market share of the pharmaceutical industry within the next decade. In addition, the increasing focus on science and technology in emerging markets is creating a growing talent pool for corporate recruitment.

Markets such as Japan and Singapore have emerged as attractive bases for international pharmaceutical companies because of their business-friendly infrastructure, strong track record in manufacturing operations, and state-of-the-art research and development (R&D) facilities. Singapore, for example, is a compelling bioscience hub that is home to six of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical companies' manufacturing facilities, says Biomedical Singapore. Korea is also experiencing rapid growth as a pharmaceutical hub because of the government’s plan to push the biotech industry to become a $60 billion market by 2016, says FierceBiotech.

Developing countries such as China and India are also attracting attention from pharmaceutical companies due to their low operational costs and the high demand for widely accessible medical care and solutions as a result of their sizeable populations. Both countries rank among the highest in the world for unnecessary blindness, a condition that is most common in inaccessible, rural parts of the countries, according to ORBIS. (ORBIS is a nonprofit, global development organization whose mission is to eliminate avoidable blindness by strengthening the capacity of local eye health partners in their efforts to prevent and treat blindness.)

However, it is a condition that can be treated with the right drugs, developed from the right resources and expertise made available. R&D investments in China and India are growing rapidly as a result of such driving factors. This growth is also occurring on a global scale, with major pharmaceutical manufacturers investing more and more in R&D to achieve a competitive edge in providing innovative drug solutions for the global community.

Amidst this immense growth, companies should ensure they continue to place a strong emphasis on product integrity – to increase their market competitiveness and constantly remain at the forefront of biomedical technology. In order to achieve these goals, it is critical that companies invest in the highest-quality equipment and cutting-edge technologies to develop reliable and effective drugs.

The new generation of visibility

Over the past decade, medical solutions have evolved dramatically, with growing demand for more sophisticated technologies, particularly in the area of microscopy. Recent technological breakthroughs in microscopy including large-scale digitalization, advances in image reconstruction and restoration have already created a significant impact on the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.

Two key developments in the field of microscopy technologies that have had a major impact on R&D in the pharmaceutical industry are confocal microscopy; and fluorescence microscopy.

• Confocal microscopy systems

Used to obtain high-resolution optical images, these systems have laid the groundwork for numerous scientific breakthroughs, resulting in a number of new and improved methods for conducting research.

First patented in 1957, confocal microscopy has gained a large following in the biological research industry recently, as new technologies such as digital imaging have made the technique much more powerful. By restricting the plane of focus of a fluorescence microscope, a confocal system allows only the in-focus light of a single layer of a specimen to come through. Scanning across each layer, and through successive layers, allows researchers to construct extremely high-resolution three-dimensional images of structures down to the sub-cellular scale. A confocal microscope’s three-dimensional capabilities can recreate a cell’s outer features in full dimensional splendor – a useful capability for work on live, whole cells.

• Fluorescence microscopy

This complements confocal microscopy and it is essential for enabling higher and more precise visibility in life-sciences research. Increasingly differentiated fluorescence applications have enabled researchers to track down molecular interactions within cells image by image. A fluorescence microscope makes use of the phenomena of fluorescence and phosphorescence instead of, or in addition to, reflection and absorption. Fluorescence microscopy technology has evolved since its inception, opening the doors for more advanced microscopes such as the confocal laser scanning microscope and the total internal reflection fluorescence microscope, and leading to greater breakthroughs in biomedical research for the pharmaceutical industry.

Looking to the future

Despite advanced technologies such as confocal and fluorescence microscopy systems available today, researchers in the pharmaceutical industry still have many challenges to overcome. Using today’s microscopes, scientists might only be looking at a single moment in time, missing the dynamic aspects of drug–cell interactions. For this reason, the microscopy and drug discovery communities, as well as industrial and educational institutions, are collaborating to develop new techniques that will allow scientists to examine live specimens in a fourth dimension: time.