Cyber breaches
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.
Navigating supply
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.
Biosimilar benefits
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.
Reproducibility crisis
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.
AI focus on oncology
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).