Industry Outlook 2025: Continuing Innovation

Looking at 2024, Michelle Bridenbaker, COO of Unbiased Science—a health science communications company—believes the most noteworthy trend shaping the bio/pharma industry has been the level of innovation that has been seen. “The first area that I really see that has been consequential has been the advances we’ve made in kind of personalizing medicine,” she says. “So, this is everything from our ability to do DNA sequencing, to RNA technology, CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats], even things that are more lab and bench work in organoids.”

Of course, adding to this trend is artificial intelligence (AI), Bridenbaker continues, which is allowing for greater analysis of data. “There’s no question that AI is also impacting [personalized medicine], because we’re catching patients [that we previously missed],” she asserts. “I work in the rare disease space, and we missed patients before, but now, we can use AI to look at data that already exists and pick out that one patient that we may not have caught before, that needle in the haystack.”

Moving into 2025 and beyond, Bridenbaker anticipates a continuation in innovation and use of AI. “In 2025 and beyond, I really feel that we are going to have to spend a lot of time educating and upskilling our workforce,” she stresses. “And I think this is sometimes underestimated. It's like, the technology is great and it's wonderful, we're implementing it, but I think as well, we have to make sure we have the requisite skills to be able to keep up with the technology.”

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About the speaker

Michelle Bridenbaker, BSN, MBA, MS, COO of Unbiased Science.

Michelle Bridenbaker, BSN, MBA, MS, is COO of Unbiased Science—a health science communications company. She is also the Vice-President of the Medical Information Leaders in Europe, and she heads up the Global Medical Information and Communications function at Recordati Rare Diseases. Michelle has approximately 20 years’ experience within industry, working across a variety of roles. Most recently, she has been involved in trying to help shape the future and strategy for the pharmaceutical industry to be more effective communicators.