2025: The year ahead in pharma and life sciences

2025 is going to be a year of great change. At a macro level, political and geopolitical shifts around the world will reshape relations. Regulation and deregulation may alter processes. And any one of these changes could upset delicate supply chains.

At a more micro level, 2025 will require each of us to remain flexible and open to new ideas and approaches. As our runways from idea to value creation are getting shorter, focusing on outcomes is a must.

Here are a few trends that I am paying attention to in the life sciences sector:

Trend 1: Efficiency and effectiveness

We’ve seen the transformative impact of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) for years. It’s now common knowledge that to be successful, a life sciences company must have a good data ecosystem in place and a strong analytical process to pull ingenious insights from that data.

In 2025, pharma companies must enable an instantaneous data-to-decision value chain that is AI-powered, cloud-based, and product-enabled. You need to ingest data rapidly, manage it, keep it relevant, secure it, and ensure the quality is great — for commercial, patient, and custom usage. The AI portion of the value chain leads to industrialisation, turning great data into actionable insights. And those insights lead to the types of decisions that deliver immediate returns in planning, customer experiences, and real-world data.

Most top pharma companies have embraced AI and generative AI (GenAI) to help pull valuable decisions out of that data. The next step is to industrialise it, to scale it up, and spread its successes to the rest of your operation. Your goal should be — and this is what we’re expecting from all life sciences companies in 2025 — to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and effectiveness that transform the future of healthcare.

And as we leverage GenAI, we must look at how, where, and when to involve Agentic AI, a concept referring to AI systems that exhibit autonomous, goal-driven behaviour, moving beyond simply generating outputs to proactively taking actions. While a bit further out, this is something to stay close to.

Trend 2: Customer engagement transformation

This brings us to the next trend. Having your data squared away is great, but it won’t matter if you don’t have the right customers or patients. Pharma companies have no easy task here. There are countless gates before your treatments reach the people who rely on them. It’s always been a challenge to get time with healthcare providers to show the value and benefits of your therapies. You need to transform your field reps, making them experts and problem-solvers, and turn them into “super reps”.

HCPs are busy; we can’t change that. But we can make the time we have with them more valuable. That begins well before a face-to-face interaction. Customer engagement models are trending towards deeper, multi-dimensional segmentation. This approach is possible when you have an abundance of clean data. This model deeply and scientifically examines the entire ecosystem, allowing for personalised messages and content delivered through an HCP’s preferred channel at the right time.

In addition, a proper customer engagement transformation in 2025 requires artificial intelligence and machine learning. This allows rapid identification of high-potential segments and institutions, interaction through hyper-targeted communications, and maximisation of sales impact.

Trend 3: Patient outcomes with impact

But it’s not just about pharma sales in 2025. It’s about making a real difference. And you do that by getting the right therapies to the right patients at the right time. You need a partner that helps increase the number of therapies that succeed in the market and thrive. The right insights in data allow the right decisions, extending critical drugs' lifecycles. By increasing these therapies’ availability and improving their success, real people with real illnesses get the treatments they need.

To keep these treatments available, you must find new buyers while retaining existing ones. A trusted pharma partner in 2025 should know how to identify at-risk patient cohorts and improve adherence by creating interventions. The best ones know how to develop and operationalise solutions infused with natural language processing and GenAI capabilities.

Proving successful patient outcomes also relies on proper clinical studies. In 2025, we’ll see more work in two main areas here: evidence generation and report authoring. A GenAI solution can help couple synthetic data with real-world evidence to bolster a therapy’s case. And when it comes time for report writing, an established GenAI partner can cut the authoring time from weeks to hours. You will need to find a solution that ingests and analyses clinical results from numerous sources and formats, generating new, medically meaningful content.

Trend 4: Rare disease/next-gen therapies

The next trend we see in 2025 is a big lift for pharma and an amazing payoff: rare diseases. Novel therapies offer the potential to improve patient outcomes and quality of life. Specialty medicine means there is no such thing as an ‘average’ patient anymore. You must seek out these patients through the providers charged with caring for them, and you’ll have to do this through patient subpopulations, each with different needs. To achieve this, critical insights must be extracted from patient-level data. Patient analytics, powered by granular data sources and sophisticated technology, will evolve in 2025 with new real-world applications. You’ll need to use a GenAI solution to help you find those subpopulations.

When you look at cell and gene therapy or rare diseases, you are looking at a very small niche disease. However, the science behind those ailments is becoming more nuanced and complex. At the same time, the outcomes are getting very well defined and better. It becomes much clearer whether a treatment either works or doesn’t. We believe patients have come to expect this clear delineation; medical peers are expecting these clearly defined outcomes. That trend will continue in 2025.

The medical community has identified at least 7,000 genetic diseases. But at this point, less than 5% of them have a treatment. No one has yet figured out how these will get priced, who will pay for it, and what impact it will have on the healthcare system. A big part of healthcare in 2025 will be the pricing aspect of rare diseases. How do we make it affordable and give access to people everywhere in the world?

The road ahead

With these trends in mind, let’s embrace 2025. Take solace in the fact that the outlook is optimistic. A wealth of data makes these insights and advancements possible, and when done right we’ll achieve unimagined outcomes!