Chemicals companies need to digitalise to be competitive, but many struggle to realise the full potential of what digital transformation could achieve for their business. A recent global study confirmed that only 19% of chemicals companies demonstrate real leadership in digital, with 45% ‘adopters’ still climbing the digital maturity curve and over a third (36%) ‘followers’, still in the early stages of digitalisation.
Advances in cell and gene therapies have happened at an exponential rate. Since Novartis broke open the market in 2017 with Kymriah – a gene therapy for blood cancer – the sector is booming and unlikely to slow down. More than 2600 trials are ongoing worldwide and the US FDA predicts it will be approving up to 20 therapies a year by 2025. Meanwhile, financing of regenerative medicine has soared.
Much emphasis is put on electric vehicle (EV) battery cells – and rightly so. However, EVs present a range of other opportunities. Cells are assembled into a pack containing a plethora of materials and components, including thermal interface materials (TIMs), fire safety, enclosures, insulation and compression foams.
Polling employers and employees around UK business during Q3 2021, data security company SecureAge discovered 48% of businesses experienced a cyber breach during the Covid-19 pandemic and another 8% ‘were not sure’. In addition, 16% of employees said they had personally had to deal with a cybersecurity incident.
The UK is experiencing a ‘perfect storm’ of supply chain related disruption. As a result, the chemicals and other industries are subject to unprecedented challenges that are likely to continue into 2022.
Earlier this summer, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) made the ground-breaking decision to recommend the expanded use of biosimilar medicines to treat moderate rheumatoid arthritis.
Reactions that fail to work consistently cause frustration and waste time, energy and expensive reagents. Even when it seems all variables are carefully controlled, yields can vary hugely, or reactions can fail altogether. In a survey of this ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science (Nature, 2016, 533, 452), almost 90% of chemists said they had failed to successfully repeat someone else’s experiment.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery is promising to drastically cut down timelines and costs of bringing new therapies to patients. IDTechEx has analysed 25 AI drug discovery companies (out of 100 companies identified) that are actively developing drug candidates and have published detailed information on their pipeline (AI in Drug Discovery 2021: Players, Technologies, and Applications).
Global forecasts for the thin-walled plastic packaging market are rising significantly. By 2028, the packaging market will be worth an estimated $1.2tn, expanding at a CAGR of approximately 3%, according to a report by multinational consultancy Smithers. Food and beverage, and more widespread adoption of thin-walled packaging in developing economies, will drive this growth.
The fact remains that in the last two years alone, UK employers have lost £2bn in apprentice-ship levy funds that they have been unable to spend. Read the comment by Adrian Grove, business development director, Qube Learning.