A Comprehensive Review on Strategies for New Drug Discovery and Enhanced Productivity in Research and Development: Recent Advancements and Future Prospectives

At present, due to increased costs, decreased productivity, and lack of breakthrough technologies, many pharmaceutical firms face various challenges in their research and development projects. A variety of environmental concerns have also been gradually placing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry, including substantial profit losses due to patent expiration, more expensive health care facilities, and more stringent regulatory requirements. A system-oriented approach to finding innovative solutions is essential to this complicated problem. In our opinion, the key to solving these challenges is to increase the quality and number of creative and cost-effective new pharmaceutical products without incurring excessive R&D expenses, both for the future profitability of pharmaceutical industries and developments in healthcare. Our main emphasis is to highlight the strategies and models like Quality by Design, Lean Six Sigma, Organ-on-Chip, Chorus, AI, and so on in delivering innovations, which can be a good positive change for industries as to increase productivity in terms of time efficiency and innovation as well. These models focus on the creation and diffusion of knowledge internal to the firms. The major focus points should include critical investigation in innovations where the risk is high, as this can lead to the safer side of the development. We then propose specific strategies that could have the most substantial impact on improving R&D productivity. Besides this, the selection of strategy and models at the same point is as important as its implementation and its accurate selection can assist pharmaceutical companies to improve R&D organizations and their productivity.