Real-world data can benefit all areas of the entire drug lifecycle, particularly drug discovery. Interestingly, FDA has already started to employ real-world data regarding approval decisions about new health treatments devices. Nevertheless, as real-world sources are often unstructured and unregulated, artificial intelligence and other digital solutions should be employed. Digital tools can help researchers access structured information across a wide range of sources. Experts agree that regulatory guidance is also needed to provide effective ways of standardizing real-world evidence. Legal issues of data ownership and technical concerns about data security need to be considered, with cybersecurity being one of the leading factors to address in research. Interestingly, it’s been proven that blockchain technology can facilitate data exchange and integrity. In fact, interoperability is another challenge which researchers need to tackle. Since real-world data sources fluctuate, with information being difficult to access or exchange, there’s a need for a global catalog or marketplace (Wise et al., 2018). Consequently, researchers have started to develop a global catalog for data, as well as a common data model for noisy and unstructured data.

The most important aspect in drug discovery is to embrace the influence digital health technology has on medical research. A common platform, for instance, can eliminate the need for data wrangling or the need for organizing a wide range of existing real-world data sources. In addition, any cloud-based platform for biomedical data can be regulated by clear business models on how to purchase data once and reuse it across disciplines. Note that incompatibility between platforms can be addressed by the integration of standards, such as Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), as well as clear roles and methodologies. These aspects of research, of course, require specific research skills for the exploitation of real-world data and Mendelian randomization. Most of all, researchers need to embrace the fact that participants have become the center of medical research and drug discovery. Real-word data should recruit people whose needs haven’t been met by current treatments, speed recruitment, and development, and optimize relevant results at an affordable cost.