Putting What We Already Know to Work

Pharmaceutical innovation is often framed as a race toward the new, but many of the industry's most practical gains come from making better use of what it already knows. Whether that means drawing on decades of safety data, published prior knowledge, or hard-won process understanding, the contributors to this issue show how existing knowledge can be turned into faster, more reliable progress.

PharmTech Europe’s September 2026 cover story makes the case for repurposing familiar generics such as metformin, propranolol, and statins as cancer therapies. Their established safety profiles, dosing regimens, and manufacturing pathways could shorten timelines, reduce costs, and ease the toxicity burden of conventional small-molecule regimens.

Knowledge is also central to our development feature on autologous cell therapies, where apheresis variability cannot simply be standardized away. Experts argue that characterizing patient material across clinical phases, eliminating avoidable variability, and treating apheresis centers as supply chain partners are essential to building processes that hold up under good manufacturing practice.

Our outsourcing interview with Jamie Evans and Joe Cobb of Lonza Capsugel explores how gap analyses, pretransfer method evaluations, and structured governance help sponsors and contract development and manufacturing organizations transfer processes without losing critical information.

On the regulatory front, the European Regulatory Watch column reports that the European Union has shifted from drafting legislation to applying it, prioritizing supply-chain resilience, shortage prevention, and artificial intelligence governance. Ask the Expert examines how recent standards and regulatory actions, including draft guidance that lets gene therapy developers leverage published prior knowledge, aim to accelerate biologics. Our European Frontrunners feature profiles European biotechs advancing bioinks and high-resolution bioprinting, aided by new European Medicines Agency clarity on 3D-printed solid oral dosage forms.

Taken together, the articles in PharmTech Europe’s September 2026 issue suggest that progress depends not only on discovery, but on how effectively the industry captures, shares, and applies what it has already learned.