Industry Outlook 2025: Looking at the Mega Trends

The past year, 2024, was a very active one, remarks Tore Bergsteiner, managing partner at MAIN5, a European consulting firm specializing in digitally enabled change for life sciences R&D organizations. “There have been a lot of changes and trends, especially in the political legislative perspective, but also related to new technical trends, influences which are gaining more momentum and maturity,” he says.

Firstly, a key trend for industry, Bergsteiner points out, is artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital transformation that is being seen. “[AI] will become a more and more relevant technique impacting our daily businesses, our overall competitiveness in the industry,” he notes. “And we have to consider that accelerated adoption and processes driven by AI/machine learning or large language models are already reshaping a variety of key processes in pharma.”

The second trend of note for Bergsteiner is the globalization of the supply chain and the monitoring of critical medicines and relevant shortages. “That means diversifying efforts to continue reducing dependency on single regions such as India or China for API, and manufacturing needs to be decreased,” he says.

Continued regulatory reforms and harmonization make up the third key trend from 2024 for industry, emphasizes Bergsteiner. “There are streamlined pathway in the US [United States] and in the EU [European Union], fostering innovation, especially in the area of rare diseases and oncology,” he remarks. “Those [pathways] are pushing companies more and more to continue digitizing their end-to-end processes to remain competitive and regulatory compliant.”

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About the speaker

Tore Bergsteiner, Managing Partner at MAIN5

Tore Bergsteiner is Managing Partner at MAIN5, a European consulting firm specializing in digitally enabled change for life sciences R&D organizations. Tore has approximately 30 years of experience in industry and has been a pioneering influence in the field of electronic regulatory submissions and within the management and publishing servicing industry. He previously worked for EXTEDO GmbH, a leading international product vendor of electronic approval systems for publicly owned and private pharmaceutical industry, and IABG GmbH, a major German technology and operating company. Tore graduated in Computer Sciences in 1996 and studied at the University of Bremen, Germany, the University of Texas, Austin, USA, and the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany.