The topic of digital healthcare is an extremely broad one to cover. New technology is being deployed daily to solve the world’s scientific challenges. What I have tried to touch on in this article are some examples of where we see these advances being implemented and what effect they may have on the property market.

The World Health Organization recently set out in their draft publication 'Draft Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020–2025' what they see the digital vision being and how healthcare solutions are enabled in the digital world.

Significant advances are being made in a number of scientific areas, from biotech organisations who specialise in targeted therapeutics with precision medicine, to big pharma collaborating to develop novel vaccine solutions. Driving and enabling this to happen is digitisation of the research and development processes, culminating in advanced manufacturing techniques, machine learning and automation.

Organisations are now able to access, process and analyse huge data sets by running outcome scenarios in the digital environment before any significant capital investment in property is made in the physical world.

We are seeing more and more companies deploying digital technology and techniques to gain healthcare and commercial advantages for drug development. Bioinformatics is being used to support focused therapeutics, coupled with increased connectivity of real data between the patients, clinicians, scientists and manufacturers, the opportunities to explore are seemingly endless.

The breakthrough in mapping of the human genome in April 2003 has enabled us to understand the human body better than ever before, and has unlocked biological solutions which were not previously available but we are now seeing these being explored.

These digital advances inevitably drive a different real estate footprint requirement, coupled with an enhanced data processing capacity requirement and workplace environment. The use of computational biology, informatics, AI and machine learning means that increasingly the research, development, process development, translational, scale-up and manufacturing processes no longer need to be in the same location.

We are also seeing discussions about the digital blockchain advantages of a distributed ledger technology being considered as a potential solution to protect against IP, validated data sets, cross-contamination avoidance (due to the autologous nature of some science) and drug development efficacy fraud, although these considerations are in their early stages.

One could argue that it makes better business sense to limit real estate exposure by having the more expensive processes delivered in the most economic areas of the country. The science ecosystem is very well connected globally; digital technology has allowed this to bring areas of the world together to work on common projects and shared goals. Start-ups, spin-outs, emerging and pre-revenue biotech organisations all want to deliver maximum results for limited cost exposure to their investors, to ultimately provide better drug prices at the end of the journey. They want the first to market position and speed to market delivery which the technology is supporting.

Flexible, adaptable and expandable facilities located where the talent is will be critical. This is where digital platforms have a distinct advantage over more traditional fixed assets (however they are still required). One thing Covid-19 has taught us is that leveraging digital capacity can be part of an overall strategy and not an either-or scenario. Those companies that deploy multiple solutions will protect themselves in the future from cost exposure in any one area.

By taking advantage of these advances, there will be huge opportunity to deploy a property strategy that brings together the skillsets of the entire country, which can simulate outcomes in advance in real time, which will ultimately drive a more efficient and productive property need.

Global collaborations such as the recent vaccine work by Pfizer and BioNTech have proven that pan-discovery platforms can be effectively delivered from multiple global locations enabled by digital collaboration.

One thing for certain is that property solutions need to adapt to this changing climate and embrace the opportunity to think of solutions that are broader than one building in one location for one client. Digitisation allows for so much more.

_{Read the articles within Spotlight: Life Sciences – Trends & Outlook below.}