Medicines of Tomorrow: Horizon Scanning Forum
Horizon Scanning: Medicines of Tomorrow is Australia’s only horizon scanning forum that brings together government, patient groups and industry to showcase new and disruptive technologies on the horizon that must be planned for today.
Presented by Medicines Australia in partnership with the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care, Medicines of Tomorrow showcases the major global therapeutic advances delivering a step change in patient treatments and outcomes and disrupting our health care system in coming years.
Robust horizon scanning is an indicator of a world-class health system and insights through horizon scanning can speed up patient access to new medicines and improve health, wellbeing and economic outcomes.
This event serves as an important platform to showcase major therapeutic advances which may enter Australia’s regulatory or reimbursement systems within the decade and may represent a significant disruption in the treatment paradigm and/or require innovation in health care system planning. The Forum also highlights the potential implications for governments from the introduction of these advances in terms of resources, systems and processes.
Medicines of Tomorrow 2024
This year, we bring together experts across four therapeutic areas where innovative new classes of medicines and treatments are on the horizon for Australians: cell and gene therapies, vaccine technology, novel antimicrobial resistance therapies and digital technologies such as artificial intelligence that are impacting medicine discovery and development processes.
Cell and gene therapies are revolutionising medicine and holds great potential to transform patient outcomes. Healthcare systems and processes, including HTA, service delivery and funding approaches, must adapt to ensure that Australians will benefit from these new technologies in efficient, patient centric healthcare delivery models. The cost, data impediments and unclear reimbursement pathways for cell and gene therapies pose a significant challenge to our existing health technology assessment system.
Advanced vaccine technologies: In a new era of infectious disease, characterised by outbreaks of emerging, re-emerging and endemic pathogens, investment in preventing disease is critical to the health of people, our economy and the sustainability of our healthcare system. Key to this is ensuring that our regulatory and reimbursement processes are ready to efficiently evaluate and appropriately value innovation and new technologies to continue to attract research and investment to Australia.
Novel antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top global public health and development threats facing man kind. It is estimated bacterial AMR was responsible for 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and has contributed to 4.95 million deaths worldwide. This session will look at the challenge of AMR, potential regulatory and reimbursement reforms, and new antimicrobial therapies in development.
Digital technologies are revolutionising the global pharmaceutical industry, through the use of AI, big data analytics and machine learning in the development of biotherapeutic products, pharmaceuticals and vaccines. How these technologies are regulated, funded and provided to patients needs to be considered in the coming years.
Australia’s first Horizon Scanning Forum – December 2022
Download the Medicines of Tomorrow 2022 Report