Predictions for life sciences industry 2020

Christian Hebenstreit, general manager and senior vice president of Medidata EMEA, a technology company that develops and markets software as a service for clinical trials, has provided his view on issues, challenges and trends for the life sciences industry as we head into 2020.

What major developments happened in the life sciences industry in 2019?

“Digitalization went mainstream. Techniques like machine learning and AI are now an essential part of clinical research. Last year, the European Medicines Agency approved 84 new drugs and 42 drugs with new active substances - that's a substantial number. This is because, as an industry, we are running more and more studies every year and we are looking into different and rarer disease areas more than ever before. And this has only been made possible due to all these new technological innovations.”