CPHI Pharma Award Winners 2022: Digital Innovation – ATMPS Ltd

Raja Sharif, CEO and Founder of ATMPS Ltd and Hataali, accepting the award on behalf of the team at CPHI Frankfurt 2022.

In this series of interviews, we speak to the teams behind the winning concepts at CPHI Pharma Awards 2022, in each of the different categories, from digital innovation to CEO of the year. 

Firstly, can you tell us a little more about ATMPS Ltd and your key priorities for the year ahead?

ATMPS Ltd and the Hataali platform were born out of the need to address the complex logistics and manufacture of advance therapies, and more broadly, the emerging complexity that personalisation of any therapeutic intervention will require. There is an inevitable intersection and convergence of all therapeutic interventions for any one patient and we require new ways to address this need to ensure patients can get the best personalised care possible.

We believe that Hataali (our patented platform) will become a digital cornerstone for advance therapies, and will be a key enabler for the scaling from the few to the many that will be treated, as well as moving them up the patient care pathway.

Our priorities this year are to:
•    Expand our integrated platform partners (MES providers, Logistics, LIMs etc)
•    Continue our differentiation from other software technologies and become the platform of choice on which even competitors can and will collaborate with reassurance and confidence
•    Progress our Hataali PoCs to wider scale adoption to become the first commercially available multi-therapy, one-portal platform leveraged at scale.

This year, you won the CPHI Pharma Awards for Digital Innovation, can you tell us more about the winning platform?

Hataali is a platform that has been built to make the lives of those that use it easier so that they can treat many more patients effectively and quickly. It is designed to connect with integrity and expediency the multitude of stakeholders that a novel advance therapy has in its arm to arm manufacture. Its modularity means it is flexible and will support and scale with therapy manufacturers from bench to factory.

Hataali was designed using first principles and is tracking chain of Identity, Custody, and Condition in a completely novel way where it accommodates the legacy digital and physical infrastructure. It is also ready for a world where individuals and patients become the point of integration for all their needs including healthcare – this is highly significant as this world is potentially closer than many of us know or understand!

The elephant in the room is price! Price meaning reimbursement by payors, cost of goods (COGs) and total cost of ownership of our platform. The more that use Hataali the lower it costs to own for all. It will also aggregate a huge array of data points across the entirety of the CGT ecosystem. This benefits all stakeholders (including rivals) as it will enable insights that will inform COGs and payor reimbursement models.

How does Hataali enable greater compliance with regulations and what advantages does this bring to the treatment process?

Hataali leverages a blockchain. This quite simply provides an immutable integrity of all digital data transactions that occur. The digital twinning of human starting material from arm to arm at each and every hand off in the supply and manufacture is digitally attested on the blockchain – Hataali is 21 CFR part 11 regulatory compliant by design. As PAT technologies start to be integrated to Hataali we believe that using the blockchain makes automated release by exception a real possibility for one batch, one patient therapies – a digital QP is potentially possible! The significance of this cannot be understated as we do not have enough QPs on the planet – it will impact COGs and volumes of patients treated if this can be achieved.

Pharma 4.0 is a hot topic at the minute, with many companies working to integrate new digital systems, what is needed from the pharma industry as a whole to help in this shift?

I can’t help but think of Einstein’s definition of insanity – to keep doing the same thing again and again and yet expecting to see a different result…

IBM spoke of People, Process, and Technology and in that order back in the 70’s – it’s as true today as it was then. Racing to get new digital tech in place will not solve the issues we are facing until we understand better what we as people want to be – culture, DE&I, Vision etc are all part of it.

We need an open and candid discussion about fear, failure, sharing, collaboration, cooperation, and related topics, specifically amongst competitors. Without this, issues like AMR will never be addressed, Sustainable Development Goals to ensure equal opportunity of healthcare regardless of where you are born will never be achievable, and 600,000 children will continue to die every year in low/middle income countries due to substandard and falsified medicines because of the failure of global health supply chains while on our watch!

How will this platform benefit the pharma industry and individual patient health over the coming years?

Quite simply as I’ve already said Hataali will be the digital cornerstone to delivering many more advance therapies to many more patients more cost effectively and on scale, bringing down the bottom-line costs by automating regulation and reducing timelines for pharma in terms of logistics and manufacture.

What does winning the award mean to you and what will it do for you as a company?

First and foremost winning was a great honour for our team as it recognises their exceptional effort and hard work. It also validates and vindicates our team vision and strategy as moderated by independent peers in the industry. What this means is that we now have greater agency and confidence when we speak to our clients and can reference the CPHI recognition as we progress in securing new partners and business for the Hataali platform.

You’ve set the bar high with this, can we expect to keep seeing more innovative work from you in the future?

Absolutely and 100% - I have alluded to this in the above. The use of Decentralised Identities to ensure patients are the point of integration for their healthcare needs is going to turn life sciences on its head. Rare disease will no longer be “rare” and hidden cancers will become ever more exposed for treatment. Our vision is to have software that will enable bedside care with advanced therapies – decentralised manufacture. Another example RCT, RWE are all industry and academic constructs that have little or no meaning to patients – this novel approach will ensure that real patients’ story arcs are recorded and shared, but only if the individual patient consents and wishes it to be so – a world were human data rights really mean what it says!

See more interviews with our winners from the 2022 Pharma Awards here.