Infosys personalizes medicine powered by SAP

More than 25% of all US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals since 2015 have been for personalized medicines (see Exhibit 1), a reflection of personalized medicine becoming more important in the context of disease prevalence, immunity to antibiotics, and limitations of traditional medicine. With personalized medicine, clinicians are better equipped to identify and treat diseases at an individual level.

However, the product lifecycle for personalized medicine, such as cell and gene therapy, is time and environment sensitive, making scaling challenging. So, Infosys developed an end-to-end solution based on SAP technologies that improve supply chain transparency and enhance the patient experience while adhering to regulations.

Exhibit 1: Personalized medicines continue to get significant FDA approvals

Source: HFS Research and Personalized Medicine Coalition, 2023

The lifecycle of personalized medicine is fraught with risk that can be addressed by enabling the right technology

Exhibit 2 illustrates the typical life cycle of personalized medicine with cell and gene therapy. The process involves drawing patient cells and gene samples, conducting apheresis, applying genetic modifications, and creating a therapy to infuse into the patient. Each step is time and environment sensitive to ensure the samples are transported safely and timely in controlled environments.

Exhibit 2: Speed and safety are critical to ensuring success with personalized medicines

Source: HFS Research, 2023

The enablement of technologies to power the personalized medicine product lifecycle will drive efficiency through supply chain transparency, enhanced safety, and adherence to regulations. More importantly, it will free pharma scientists and clinicians to focus on enhancing the overall processes and improving the efficacy of therapies.

Infosys’ personalized medicine solution addresses critical parts of the life cycle

Infosys, in collaboration with SAP capabilities such as S/4 HANA digital platform, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), developed the Personalized Medicine Solution.

Infosys’ personalized medicine solution addresses challenges impacting the scaling of personalized medicines, escalating costs, and limiting its potential.

• Logistics: There are many moving parts (patient identification, sample collection, transportation, apheresis, lab work, micro-manufacturing, refrigeration, infusion) requiring improved collaboration across several stakeholders—with no room for errors.
• Technologies: While pharmas have been leaders in adopting emerging tech, they have not scaled new technology across the industry value chain.
• Regulatory: The level of compliance can be onerous on pharmas, impacting processes and financials.

The choice of SAP is logical for Infosys, given its strengths with SAP technologies and that most pharmas use SAP as their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Infosys leverages SAP BTP to manage the front-end interactions between patients and healthcare providers, including patient selection, sample collections, and apheresis. SAP S/4 HANA is used to power manufacturing and logistics, and SAC facilitates analytics and reporting.

The Bottom Line: On the back of the pandemic-driven energy, pharmas have all the components needed to scale personalized medicine: increased demand (prevalence, mutations, variants), technology enablement capabilities, and science.

Personalized medicine continues to expand, allowing physicians to select a treatment based on a patient’s genetic profile that might minimize harmful side effects, promise a more successful result, and be more cost effective than a “trial-and-error” approach to disease treatment. The Infosys solution enables pharmas to effectively address transaction processing, logistics, and regulatory demands so they can focus on democratizing treatment.