What is (and why there is) Innovation Day?
World Creativity and Innovation Day is celebrated all over the world on April 21st, and its origin is intrinsically linked to a very creative and innovative historical character: Leonardo da Vinci.
Da Vinci had a great mind and created significant advances in Painting, Mathematics, Music, Geology, Astronomy, and Cartography, just to name a few. And the World Creativity and Innovation Day was created to homage to him but also to stimulate people to also look for new ideas to improve the world we live in.
Creativity and Innovation at Fagron
Fagron core values are:
- The customer is number one
- Creativity
- Quality
- Entrepreneurship
- Speed of execution
This means we value creativity and innovation/entrepreneurship, in the way that we behave, and communicate. We believe that empowering our coworkers to use their creativity to find innovative solutions for the personalized medicine sector is key to bringing better solutions for people around the world. Through open discussions, where everyone is unique and encouraged to express their ideas, together we create the future of personalized medicine.
Innovation at every step
Fagron’s core business is personalized medicine, which, by itself, is an innovative way of providing healthcare to patients: instead of the all-size fits all model currently used for most medicines, in Fagron we truly believe each human being is unique and deserves also a unique treatment for their needs. Therefore, we exercise at most creative and innovative ideas to provide what we call patient-friendly or patient-centered drugs, as they are friendly and centered on the practical demands of patients.
One example: doctors usually rely on protocols or guidelines to treat specific health conditions – for example, alopecia (hair loss). However, a considerable number of patients do not see the expected clinical results, because their body is simply non-reactive to traditional substances such as minoxidil. In that sense, we have developed a genetic test capable of identifying whether this patient has or not the gene variations responsible for the hair regrowth effects of minoxidil, the TrichoTest. If the test shows no effect, then the doctor can promptly select a different treatment with better outcomes.
Additionally, we have also developed a line of topical vehicles to produce treatments for hair (TrichoConcept). Those vehicles, to product solutions, foams, creams, shampoos, or conditioners, contain selected ingredients from a vegetal origin that can boost the treatments for alopecia. This is how we plan our innovations: always strategically thinking to provide the best treatment, in the best presentation, to our clients.
The patient at the center of innovations
We always work with ideas to solve existing health problems. In this sense, a new form of administration can lead to immediate benefits for the patient. A practical and well-known example: a considerable fraction of the population has limitations in swallowing pills or capsules (for example Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy and other neurological disorders, thyroidectomy, radiotherapy in the head and neck region, psychiatric patients or patients resistant to treatment, etc).
Thus, even if treatment already exists (in the form of industrialized medicine), the patient does not follow the prescription, which invariably leads to a sub-optimal or non-existent response. A more careful look by the prescriber should exist in these situations, and in this sense, it is prudent to prescribe the drug in a new presentation that is more friendly (that is, thought with the patient central to the healing process) such as orodispersible tablets or films, solutions or suspensions (“syrups”), or another that increases the patient’s interest in the medicine. In addition, the dose can be adjusted to the patient’s real needs, unlike the standard dose of industrialized drugs, which are the same for the entire population (regardless of weight, height, gender, enzymatic and metabolic differences, etc.).
This optimization of medication for each case is, as you might expect, at the heart of compounding pharmacy – and also of functional medicine/nutrition – so, an innovative way of obtaining maximum clinical efficacy.
You can learn more about our story and our purpose here and how quality is always present in all our innovations here.
