Drug quality control, the About Pharma Digital Awards at Merck Italia

Merck Italia, the Italian affiliate of Merck, a leading scientific and technological company, was awarded during the final ceremony of the About Pharma Digital Awards, which took place last Thursday at the Allianz Cloud in Milan, with the Project “Artificial Intelligence for quality control analysis”, in the ‘Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0’ category. The project – reports a note – presented by the team at the Merck site in Guidonia Montecelio, consists of a prototype that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the quality control (QC) of drugs.

Qc is a fundamental process for a pharmaceutical company, in order to guarantee the safety and effectiveness of the drugs produced, which starts from the control of the raw materials, up to the finished product, using various types of analysis, including chromatography, used to separate, identify and quantify the different components of a drug. Merck Italia’s proposal sees the use of AI, in particular that based on ‘deep learning’, in order to minimize the current variability in data analysis and guarantee greater consistency in the results.

Merck Italia also reached the final with four other projects, in the categories Digital in Esg, Clinical research, ‘Digital health partnership and Telemedicine. The presence in such heterogeneous categories – the note reports – testifies to Merck Italia’s oversight of all phases of the value chain in the healthcare world: from support to research and clinical practice in collaboration with health professionals, to the proposal of digital health solutions to improve doctor-patient interaction, up to sustainability for the communities and territories in which the company operates.

“This award, and the good placings in various categories, make us happy and fill us with pride – declares Ramón Palou de Comasema, President and CEO of Healthcare of Merck Italia – because they enhance our integrated presence in all phases of the healthcare supply chain. This is a recognition that rewards our desire to always be pioneers of pharmaceutical innovation, and comes in a special week for us, in which we celebrated the 50th anniversary of our R&D site in Guidonia, an excellence for our Italian organization and for the entire Merck group”.

Now in their 11th edition, the About Pharma Digital Awards this year saw 19 categories within which it was possible to present projects, evaluated by a jury made up of 48 experts according to three criteria: originality of the idea and innovativeness of the approach ; ability to involve stakeholders and respect deadlines and achieve objectives.