BIOINFORMATICS AND DIGITAL LITERACY AS FACTORS IN RENEWING APPROACHES TO TEACHING PHARMACEUTICAL BIOTECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Current trends in the development of pharmaceutical biotechnology education highlight the need to integrate digital tools into student curricula, while data handling, predictive modeling, and in silico approaches remain largely on the periphery of the educational process. International reviews indicate that digital literacy, electronic systems, telemedicine, data analysis, and simulation-based approaches have already become integral to the professional environment of pharmacists and pharmaceutical biotechnologists; however, in most educational programs, they are taught only fragmentarily or are absent altogether. At the same time, pharmaceutical biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sciences increasingly rely on modeling, simulation, digital laboratory environments, and reproducible digital workflows to optimize drug development and support personalized pharmacotherapy approaches. Modern pharmacy is increasingly shifting from classically chemically synthesized drugs towards biotechnological medicines produced using cell cultures, recombinant DNA technology, and genetic engineering techniques. Such medicines include monoclonal antibodies, recombinant proteins, vaccines, and gene therapy agents, offering more targeted and personalized therapeutic approaches. Under these conditions, pharmaceutical bioinformatics appears not as a narrow elective topic, but as an effective framework for integrating data analysis, digital modeling, and open science principles into educational curricula. For Ukraine, this implies the need to move from episodic digitalization of education towards a systematically coordinated model, in which digital competencies, in silico methods, and elements of open science become a mandatory component of training for future pharmacists and pharmaceutical biotechnologists