Metaverse to enhance medical and biopharmaceutical industry: Accenture

Scientists and medical technology leaders expect the metaverse to have a positive impact on their organisations according to a new report.

The Accenture Life Sciences Technology Vision 2022 report explained that nearly half of the biopharma executives surveyed believe the metaverse will have a breakthrough or transformational impact on their organisations.

The report explores the technology trends that will transform how biopharmaceutical and medical technology companies solve manufacturing and device problems, improve equity in clinical trial participation and build more resilient supply chains to provide patients and healthcare professionals with more personalised experiences.

Petra Jantzer, global industry life sciences lead at Accenture, said, "We are in the early days of the metaverse, and the technology innovations we implement today — the solutions, products and services companies offer, how they develop and distribute them and how they fundamentally operate their organisations — are the building blocks of the future for life sciences.

“Industry leaders are pioneering a new digital future for how people and enterprises interact, and many of the rules remain undefined. It is critical that life sciences companies take steps to proactively and responsibly shape the metaverse continuum.”

Four trends

In the report, four technology trends that underpin the metaverse continuum are explored; Web3, programmable world. AI and quantum computing.

The report explains that in the future, a new generation of digital devices will integrate into the metaverse and could include smart technology in everyday objects like home appliances, and ‘smart’ cars that provide salient data on healthy human behaviours along with medically regulated devices such as Donisi, which can simultaneously detect and analyse multiple bio-parameters.

Nearly 90 percent of the MedTech and biopharma executives surveyed believe that programming the physical environment will emerge as a competitive differentiation in their industry.

Augmented reality, 5G, ambient computing, 3D printing, and smart materials are converging in sophisticated ways, turning the physical world into an environment that is as smart, customisable, and as programmable as the digital one.

Synthetic data is being used to train AI models in ways that real-world data practically cannot or should not. Synthetic data can represent patient datasets for use in research, training, or other applications.

This data can be shared, maintaining the same statistical properties while protecting confidentiality and privacy. It can be developed to accommodate increased diversity to counter bias, thus overcoming the pitfalls of real-world data.

According to the report, 92 percent of biopharma and 91 percent of MedTech executives report that their organisation is dependent on AI technologies to function effectively.

Nearly all the surveyed biopharma (94 percent) and MedTech (96 percent) executives agree that their organisation is pivoting in response to the unprecedented computational power that is becoming available.