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COVID-19 has struck us during a digital age where many sectors are exploring new means to deal with the pandemic. The biopharmaceutical sector is at the forefront of this fight along with the healthcare professionals. Biopharmaceutical companies and academia are challenged to discover new methods to combat COVID-19 while minimising contact in the workplace.
In the pharmaceutical industry, digitalisation has made productions much more dynamic and flexible, and there is a rapid development of treatments using big data. Healthcare institutions and biomedical research laboratories are reliant on big data to collect results that can be analysed and interpreted for both epidemiological and pharmaceutical breakthroughs. In this pandemic, big data has helped scientists to identify potential drugs that can be used to treat similar viruses, and epidemiologists to better model the spread of the infectious disease. This in turn has led to the discovery of many pivotal facts regarding the virus, as well as novel vaccines and drugs that show significant results in slowing or stopping the growth of the virus.
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In addition, new technological innovations such as the traditional automated guided vehicle (AGVs) and the more sophisticated sibling, the autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have been used to assist in pharmaceutical manufacturing, as well as in public spaces to enforce safe distancing measures. In this series of talks, we hope to expose students to some of the current and upcoming technologies used to combat COVID-19 from different aspects. Topics on drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, infectious disease modelling and robotics will be discussed.
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Dr Alex Cook is an associate professor and the vice dean at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. He is also an associate professor at the Department of Statistics and applied Probability at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and at the Health Services and Systems Research at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School. He leads a multidisciplinary team that does modeling and analytics for public health problems, especially infectious disease outbreaks.
Dr Alex Cook
Mr Fernando Otero is the AVP and Plant Manager in MSD-Singapore and he has 25 years of experience in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing across a wide range of modalities. He has also worked and supported pharmaceutical activities in 6 continents. He obtained his Executive Master’s in Technology Management from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
Mr Fernando Otero
Dr. Dinesh Gunasekeran is a practicing medical doctor, clinician scientist, and senior lecturer (medical innovation) at NUS. He is currently a Physician Leader (Telemedicine) in Raffles Medical Group, and a clinician researcher (Artificial Intelligence) at SERI in SGH. He has received the commonwealth fellowship in innovation award, is named on the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30 list for Science and Healthcare, and previously co-founded telehealth start-up Doctorbell (acquired in 2018 by MaNaDr Mobile Health).
Dr Dinesh Gunasekeran
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