How Indegene helps global pharma cos develop drugs faster amid Covid

Indegene uses AI and ML, and medical data mining to speed up digital transformation at top life sciences organisations

Humanigen, a biopharma company, needed to quickly increase the number of participants in its phase-3 clinical trial process for its drug Lenzilumab. This formulation is used by newly-hospitalised Covid-19 patients. It struggled to identify relevant trial participants from the high volume of generic website traffic and build credibility with patients and caregivers to participate in the trial. However, Indegene, a Bengaluru-based technology-led healthcare solutions provider, augmented Humanigen’s traditional CRO (contract research organisation) model with digital strategies, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, and medical data mining for precise and effective targeting. The firm deployed engaging, data-driven digital campaigns for diverse patient recruitment based on geography, demography and interest-based signals. As a result, Indegene qualified seven per cent of patients through the primary screening process and helped Humanigen comply to regulatory requirements in tight timelines.

At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown challenges as well as opportunities in front of the pharma industry, Indegene is playing a key role in accelerating digital transformation at several top global life sciences organisations.

The life sciences industry is witnessing tremendous change with a growing focus on personalisation, transformation of go-to-market models, and rapid adoption of real-world data and evidence to improve health outcomes. As life sciences organisations adapt to a digital-first operation, Indegene has emerged as a leading, specialist service provider through its medical expertise, fit-for-purpose technology, and agile, global delivery model.

“We helped some of the companies focused on Covid (like making vaccines) to process their safety events much much faster using a combination of medical expertise and artificial intelligence,” said Manish Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Indegene. 

Also, there were many biotech companies that were not focused on Covid. But their clinical trials for various diseases slowed down drastically due to the pandemic. “Using a digital-first approach, we could help companies to accelerate their clinical trials,” said Gupta.

Life sciences companies also faced the challenge of maintaining relationships with doctors. This led to the ramping up of digital engagement across the board. Indegene helped companies to maintain relationships and communication with doctors and continue the scientific conversations during remote engagements.

Also, the medical processes in pharma firms are very human-intensive run by professionals like medics and PhDs. However many of these processes can be automated. “In those places, we said we will bring NLP ( natural language processing) and computer vision,  and automate those processes,” said Gupta. “We developed AI-based tools to process a lot of stuff which was done manually. We increased the throughput and efficiency significantly across areas such as drug safety and regulatory (processes). We have developed a lot of  (tools) to solve problems like bringing down the sales and marketing costs, or cutting down the cycle times for regulatory approvals.”

For instance, one of the top three biopharma companies witnessed a surge in volume to process non-serious cases of adverse event reporting. These were as high as 1.2 million in a short period of 6 months. A lack of automation of existing manual processes required 45 to 50 minutes to process each case. Indegene’s AI, ML and NLP-driven platform, NEXT Adverse Events Management auto-ingested structured case documents and unstructured data sources such as text emails. Through automation and safety experts, Indegene is reducing case processing time by 50 per cent and cost by 60 per cent, while ensuring over 98 per cent accuracy in processing cases.

Life science companies also spend a good portion of their revenue or about 25 per cent on sales and marketing. That is not only an expensive proposition but also has many issues related to compliance and ethics. Pharma companies have to pay billions of dollars in fines related to various unethical marketing practices. And they are looking for alternate models. “What we're saying is that using a digital-first approach for sales and marketing, essentially commercialisation, you can drive sales, not at 20-25 per cent, but at around 10 per cent of revenues, while delivering better customer experience,” said Gupta. 

For instance,  Indegene has AI driven-intellectual property Digital Rep Equivalent (DRE) that uses a combination of robust algorithms, proprietary data sets of 200 million interactions, and data of over 1.8 million physicians. It powers a future-ready hybrid (digital and physical) sales model to deliver the same impact as a traditional field representative at a fraction of the cost with an enhanced customer experience.

Founded in 1998 by five first-generation entrepreneurs, Indegene now has more than 4,000 employees across North America, Europe, China, Japan and India. It counts healthcare and pharma companies Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Sanofi and Amgen among its top customers, according to the sources.

Last year, Indegene attracted $200 million funding from private equity firm Carlyle Group and Brighton Park Capital, which is supporting it in the global expansion. 

The firm is observing an acceleration of its business amid the pandemic. It recently established new Global Development Centers in Mexico, Poland and Ukraine to enable life sciences organisations, accelerate their digital transformation. As life sciences, organisations adopt agile practices to innovate and introduce life-saving products, Indegene’s new centres help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their operations.

Last year, Indegene acquired US-based Medical Marketing Economics LLC (MME)--a healthcare market access and pricing strategy firm--for about $10 million to bolster its emerging biotech and medical offerings. Indegene's estimated revenues for FY2022 is in the $200 million range.