The Merge Between Infotech and Biotech: A Call To Revise Pharmacy Education?

This document discusses how information technology and biotechnology are converging in the current 4th industrial revolution. It questions whether pharmacy education needs to be revised to prepare pharmacists for rapid technological changes that could disrupt the field. Specifically, it argues that pharmacists must upgrade their digital skills through online courses to remain relevant as technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are applied to drug discovery, personalized medicine, and automated pharmacy services. The future role of pharmacists may change as patients can access medication information and instructions through virtual assistants and receive prescriptions from automated pharmacies. Updating skills now through available online resources can help pharmacists adapt to these technological transformations and ensure they continue contributing to healthcare.

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The Merge Between Infotech and Biotech: A Call To Revise Pharmacy Education?

Uploaded by

Castobary Munishi

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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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The merge between infotech and biotech: a call to revise

pharmacy education?
As we start the second decade of the 21st century, we are living in the fourth industrial
revolution of which of the cardinal features is the merge between information technology and
biotechnology. A thin line is being drawn between these two technologies which are no longer
parallel and they are heading towards a convergence as the days pass. Both technologies are
growing at a very rapid rate nothing like what happened in the previous industrial revolutions all
of which had a huge impact on human society especially on the nature of work. How will these
rapidly growing 4th industrial revolution technologies affect how we work specifically for us
pharmacists? Is the current education preparing us to remain relevant in the coming years?

Information technology which is the use of computers to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate
which currently rapidly developing in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big
data, virtual reality to name but a few. We have witnessed how rapidly these technologies are
growing and disrupting every sector including healthcare of which pharmacists are one of the
key stakeholders. This generates a very important question will the skills that we learn today in
our pharmacy skills remain relevant in the next 20 years considering the fact that digital
technologies are penetrating into the healthcare and they are not an integral part of our current
training.

Take an example, If you want to automate pharmacy services who is at a better position? A
pharmacist who can write code and work well with pro coders, or a pharmacist who knows
nothing about coding and gives the instructions to the coders what should the automatic
pharmacy be like.

On the other arm biotechnology is growing at a rapid rate and catalyzed by completion of the 13
years Human genome project in 2003 that mapped the genes in the human genome and led to the
rapid growth of fields like genomics, pharmacogenomics, proteomics, metabolomics and all the
other ‘-omics’. These technologies generate huge amounts of data of which proper analysis
requires the use of information technologies like big data analytics, machine learning, deep
learning and this is where these technologies are merging and together, they have the potential to
revolutionize the health sector and they promise us personalized medicine.
Source: Nature, Michele Marconi “How Artificial Intelligence is changing drug discovery”, 2018.

These technologies are already in action happening in companies like Cytosolve who are using
computers for the drug discovery and development process through in silico mechanistic
modelling and Insilico medicine who are using artificial intelligence for drug discovery,
biomarker development and aging research.

People now google their medications and side effects as well as drugs interactions, what does
this tell us, how should we get be prepared? Information is being available more than ever before
, what should we do in-order for our services to remain relevant at the time when someone can
go to an ATM like pharmacy sends their e-prescription via their mobile phone get the packaged
medications at the ATM pharmacy and the instructions on how to use them is well described
through their mobile phone via a virtual assistant like google assistant and patient can actually
ask anything that virtual assistant and get the latest information from the recent publication about
their medication. What will be our role then? Are we prepared enough for that time?

Technology is tool just like hoe in the agricultural revolution people learned how to use it well
and they could use it to massively produce food that changed the human society forever. As
pharmacists we cannot be able to use this tool very well to improve our services and catch up
with the new direction of the world if we do not upgrade our skills. With the new skills we will
be in position to make a transformation in things like Drug Discovery and Development as
artificial intelligence has been shown to have a huge potential in speeding up the drug discovery
from 10 – 12 years by a factor of 15 which could reduce cost and save time. For example, in the
current COVID-19 if pharmacists could be well equipped with digital skills, I think we could be
in position to come up with the cure and COVID vaccine fast enough.

Times are changing, we should change too to remain relevant to protect our profession. The good
thing about the current era you do not need to wait a syllabus review to start upgrading your
skills all you need to know is how you want to upgrade their skills and can actually start to learn
on your own in your free time. There are a lot of website and applications that you can learn a lot
of skills available both free and paid courses in websites like Harvardx, Edx, Linkedin Learning,
Udemy, ilearn among many others which keep increasing. Take action today, the future is
already here, you will need a complex set of skills in0order to remain relevant.