San Francisco’s tourist schedule starts each year with JP Morgan’s Healthcare conference – 2020 is the 38th year and 9,000 visitors listened toover 450 company presentations. The biopharmaceutical industry is driving changes in healthcare, and biopharma is at the top of the fluid industry hierarchy.

Having worked in and sold into the fluid industries since 2008, the following subsegments are useful in breaking down product and customer needs:

1. Biopharma & Healthcare
2. Food & Beverage – Including agriculture
3. Industry – From semiconductors to chemicals
4. Water Treatment – From re-use to storm water

Biopharma and Healthcare are at the top of the fluid hierarchy because it has the broadest impact based on:

• Number of professionals
  • 10 million physicians, 20 million nurses, 2 million dentists, 2.5 million pharmacists (estimated by the World Health Organization)
• Total revenue of the industry
  • The market for all healthcare is estimated at $12 trillion, biopharmaceuticals are estimated to be $530 billion by 2025
• Biopharma sets the standards
  • Based on the value of their therapies, the 17 million liters of 2020 biopharma capacity are each worth about $5,000 – nearly $20,000 per gallon.
  • The value and volume and precision expectations of these materials set the standards for yield, quality and compliance when working with fluids.

StatNews is the best source of commercial and product news around JP Morgan and other healthcare industry activity – but for the strategic, production and operational issues confronting the industry, BioPharm International is a trade news organization that has great depth and detail.

Four trends will dominate biopharma over the next decade, and their implementation in biopharma will drive them out into other markets that work with fluids and liquids.

Quality:

Therapies add years to the patients life. Mistakes with therapies kill patients. The precision, cleanliness, and focus on predictable performance within the complex biological systems of the human body require a rigorous and disciplined approach to quality. To drive quality and patient safety, manufacturers encourage cultures of candor and compliance. The long development cycles of new drugs require focus and candor, otherwise small mistakes can compound and derail multi-billion dollar investments. The focus on quality trickles out to vendors and the rest of the supply chain.

Processing Speed:

The constraint to growth in biopharma has long been product development cycles – patient safety concerns drive regulators to be diligent in their approval process. However, as classes of products become more accepted, the industry is seeing the constraints move towards production. With over 70 monoclonal antibodies approved and that number forecast to triple based on FDA applications, the industry is approaching the speed of production systematically in order to get more products to market.

Regulations:

The US FDA is the most successful regulator of all time, directly overseeing more than 2 trillion in products, representing over 10% of US GDP. The FDA’s regulatory powers are much broader, as the standards that are set spill over into other markets – some estimate up to 1/2 of US GDP – and then set the high bar for standards globally. Vendors and manufacturers who can sell into this market are able to have broad impact because they have the ability to work with the highest standards and the most common set of rules available globally.

Data:

Fluid dynamics, statistics, big data, internet of things (“IoT”), industrial IoT (“IIoT”), satellite imaging, machine learning, artificial intelligence (“AI”) – name the computational tool or buzzword, and the margins of the biopharma industry make it possible. By leading with data, sensors and other advanced tools, the industry paves the way for their deployment in other parts of the economy.