Navigating the Future

In August it feels odd to be speculating what people will find important on the final days of December 2023, but that’s the job when creating next year’s editorial calendar. Sensible navigation typically means maintaining a series of fixed compass headings. But to optimize any journey one must make calculations regarding prevailing weather patterns, current good health, and the indispensability of certain predestined ports of call. As part of a large team, this engenders boatloads of discussion. Ultimately, however, we end up in the same spot and in the same boat.

Writing about the calendar allows me to illustrate how inputs arrive from diverse sources. This includes feedback from articles, discussion at conferences, and mining our own podcasts, video interviews, and symposia presentations. An upcoming September Drug Solutions podcast is a conversation with Dr. Uwe Schoenbeck, chief scientific officer, External Research and Development Innovation (ERDI); and senior vice president, Worldwide Research and Development (WRD), Pfizer. Quite a job title and quite the challenging job. He is also navigating the industries future, albeit with a broader mission than our editorial team. In this dialogue, Uwe covers what’s important to Pfizer when in comes to partnering, by emphasizing areas such as repeat expansion disorders, senescence, DNA damage response and nucleic acid sensing, deubiquitinase pathways, and neuroinflammation. Pfizer feels these hold special promise for new innovative therapies.

And I was struck by a Parthian shot. “An area everyone, including us, is looking into for further improvements,” he fired at me, “is targeted delivery. True not just for RNA but true for small molecules, large molecules, and also oligo-based therapies … there’s a lot of activity for lipid nanoparticles for local delivery, there’s a lot of activity in the capsid space, so any kind of tropism that you can introduce that would really be selective, and could be dialed in and out as desired, would be a very promising platform that we would be very interested in, obviously.”

I can look into the future and it is manifestly obvious targeted delivery will be on next year’s calendar.

About the author

Chris Spivey is the editorial director of Pharmaceutical Technology.

Article details

Pharmaceutical Technology
Vol. 46, No. 8
August 2022
Pages: 10

Citation

When referring to this article, please cite it as C. Spivey, “Navigating the Future,” Pharmaceutical Technology 46 (8) 2022.