Pharmaceutical Technology® chats with Miguel Forte from ISCT and Kiji Therapeutics about expectations for 2025 and the future technology agenda for industry.
One thing that Miguel Forte, president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT), board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics, wants to see discussed in 2025 is the overall value proposition of drug products to patients. Companies should have a clear focus on manufacturing and optimization of technology to improve cost efficiency and improve access to patients, he asserts.
Looking at the potential technology agenda for industry in 2025, Forte remarks that the use of novel technologies is a key pressure point that will set the tone for industry as we move forward. “There's probably two elements,” he says. “One is the technical element itself: How do we manage and control and flow of information of those technical elements? And that's where we're going to see more closed systems, more automated systems, and more devices that can do things on their own. But then we need to control that in terms of information. That's where AI [artificial intelligence] will be particularly relevant.”
Additionally, from a technology agenda perspective, decentralized manufacturing will be important for industry in the future, Forte adds. “For the decentralization of the manufacturing, we need two things,” he continues. “We need devices that are able to be deployed closer to the patients, and information technology that is able to control those multiple devices. Because if you do decentralized manufacturing, you continue to have a single product that needs to be consistently released and have consistently the same characteristics across those multiple devices, and that requires flow of analytical data, flow of control in process, control data, and fine tuning that will require significant IT and adaptive IT, which is where AI comes in.”
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Miguel Forte, president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics
Miguel Forte is president of International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, board member of Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics—a company developing engineered cell therapies for inflammatory diseases. Miguel holds an MD and a Specialist in Infectious Diseases from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, a PhD in Immunology from the University of Birmingham, and a certificate on Health Technology Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Additionally, he is Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the RCP in the UK.
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