Many Firsts In 2020

Although the current pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis for the modern world, it has also pushed the industry to cultivate boxes of innovation and technology, leading to many firsts in world history. The year 2020 saw maximum innovations reaching from lab to market in minimum possible time.

- Dr Manbeena Chawla

The year 2020 began with the industry planning to further rise in the medtech, biopharma and startups space within the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The overall focus in 2020 was intended to be on applied research and adaptation of new technologies, with emphasis on affordability and manageability for APAC companies. But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic casted a spell of uncertainty across the world putting the capabilities of the life sciences industry on test.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which emerged as an unknown pneumonia-like disease in December 2019, gained the status of a global health crisis, by March 2020. Enforced lockdowns caused temporary shutdown of labs and production facilities. The effect of COVID-19 was so enormous that thousands of clinical trials, around 80 per cent of non-COVID-19 trials, were stopped or interrupted.

Many researchers were pulled away from working on clinical trials to work in emergency medical care, especially during the initial months of the pandemic in places where the pandemic threatened to overwhelm critical care resources. In terms of indication, oncology saw the highest number of disrupted clinical trials followed by central nervous system, infectious diseases, gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases.