Highlights on the 21st INTERPHEX Week Japan 2019: The Future of Pharmaceutical – Robotics, Regenerative Medicine, and Cross-industry Collaborations

With already excited program from the past four-exhibition pharmaceutical technology expo of INTERPHEX JAPAN, In-PHARMA JAPAN, BioPharma Expo, and BIOtech Japan (now PharmaLab Japan), INTERPHEX Week Japan, for the first time in 2019, added a concurrent show of Regenerative Medicine Expo, and thus became the most representative B2B pharmaceutical trade show in Asia. Multi-country exhibition groups were invited by the organizer, including Taiwan, Korea, and China. The total number of delegates were over 42,000.

The INTERPHEX Week Japan consisted five separated themes – Manufacturing & Packaging, Ingredients, Biopharmaceutical, Drug Discovery, and Regenerative Medicine – throughout three exhibition halls, counting more than 1,280 exhibitors from 34 countries this year. A number of large Japanese corporations including SONY, Meiji, Yahoo! Japan, HITACHI also expanded their footprints to the biopharmaceutical and healthcare business, demonstrating a strong cross-industry strength and providing new solutions from cell sorter, spectral analyzer, DNA data bank, to innovative AI/IoT technologies.

Mr. Tad Ishizumi, president of Reed Exhibitions (the event organizer), pointed out during his welcome speech at the VIP reception party that 2019 INTERPHEX Week is the largest scale in history. Also, considered that Regenerative Medicine has showed great potential in applications and importance in pharmaceutical industry, Regenerative Medicine Expo was added to INTERPHEX Week this year for the first time, hoping to drive connections and cooperations among different sectors in the pharmaceutical industry. Having a goal to become the largest pharmaceutical exhibition globalwide, Reed has been actively inviting the participation of international companies and visitors to promote networking and to expand perspective. In 2020, INTERPHEX Week will also include Drink JAPAN and Foodtech JAPAN, with an expectation of increasing exhibitors from 1,280 to 1,900, and booming visitors up to 80,000 people, while international visitors will grow from 1,400 to 5,000 people.

In an interview with GeneOnline, Mr. Masaki Soda, the show director, mentioned that the two newly added exhibitions, PharmaLab Japan, and Regenerative Medicine Expo, were the major highlights for INTERPHEX Week Japan 2019. While the traditional R&D has been very important, laboratory procedure and process management have also been highly regarded in the intensively competitive pharmaceutical environment, thus, PharmaLab Japan has included a lab automation zone to gather expertized exhibitors in one place to provide automation solutions for lab researchers to consider replacing labor with robotic technologies, then, increasing the accuracy and processing time.

Besides the new exhibitions, two new topics were also added to the conference: “Next-generation Pharma Facilities with AI/Iot Technologies” and “Key Issues to Make Pharma Facilities with IoT Technologies”. The two sessions featured company leaders from HITACHI, Takeda, FA Products, and Azbil, etc., each attracted over a thousand attendees, which showed a changing trend of relying AI and IoT supports in the future pharmaceutical R&D.

Apart from that, the conference focused on some of the popular global issues: AI/IoT in pharma manufacturing, evidence-based medicine (EBM), big data, oligonucleotide therapeutics, gene therapy, high potency drugs and antibody APIs, innovation in medicine, regenerative medicine and R&D. The conference kicked off with a number of keynote speakers from Astellas Pharma, Shionogi & Co., Ltd, Chugai Pharmaceutical and Takeda. They discussed topics ranging from the growth factor of Japanese pharma, continuous manufacturing, evolution of biotechnology and innovation as well as the breakthrough in R&D. With speakers from leading pharma, guests and attendees engaged actively throughout the event. In addition to the various sessions that presented, there were seminars brought out by academic institutions and industry. In the three-day conference, there were around 300 speeches delivered.

GeneOnline will later report exclusive news from Technical Session of INTERPHEX Week Japan. To gain the first-hand industry trends, stay tuned for more details!

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GeneOnline