Pharmacovigilance (PV) is pharmacological science where service providers help in collection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention of adverse effects in pharmaceutical products like drugs and medical devices. Major players in this industry are Cognizant, Accenture, TAKE Solutions, Oviya MedSafe. Due to fast-growing investments in clinical trials for various COVID-19 therapies (vaccines, antivirals and convalescent plasma), COVID-19 has expanded focus on safety operations, thus giving a boost to Pharmacovigilance. Pharmacovigilance services rise amidst COVID-19 because the new virus outbreak has created a large number of opportunities for PV businesses to utilize their resources and provide end-users with professional services. Since March, companies like Cognizant, Accenture and boutique players such as TAKE Solutions and Oviya MedSafe have been very busy providing global customers with increased PV-related services.
In clinical trials, COVID-19 has generated lots of demand for PV services. This is because a variety of experiments have been launched to examine therapeutic options for the pandemic, and because of the pandemic, safety control of non-COVID-19 trials has become more difficult. The aspirations for groundbreaking technology-based initiatives to track the safety of patients in clinical trials have risen.
Major players in this industry are pursuing new innovation avenues by creating automated PV solutions and tools to enable new medicines to be rapidly evaluated. In addition, existing players such as IQVIA and Bayer are launching PV products in order to consolidate their market position, while new entrants are concentrating on expanding their portfolio in order to develop a broad customer base and establish their market presence.
With several cases of COVID-19 infection recorded as adverse events in relation to medicinal products taken by patients for non-COVID-19 indications, PV has faced multiple sets of challenges at post-approval levels. This has increased the workload, and strong PV expertise is needed within a short time to evaluate the ‘noise vs signal’ ratio from such huge numbers of reports received. In such a situation where everybody is ready to get a vaccine / cure for the pandemic, technology has lent an effective helping hand and PV is becoming more significant than ever.
According to a recent study by Emergen Research , the global market of Pharmacovigilance services rise amidst COVID-19 and is projected to nearly triple to $12 billion by 2027, with rapid growth due to an increase in spontaneous reporting, electronic health record mining, cohort case tracking and increased reporting of adverse drug reactions.
