EXPLORATORY RESEARCH OF BIG DATA IN HALAL VACCINES

Halal industry is a wide industry, which can be classified into many categories
such as food, premises, finance, logistics, tourism and others. However, this research
only looks into Halal certification category. This is because Halal certification is
important as it is the sole identifying mark that the product meets the Halal
requirements. There are seven types of subcategories which are food & beverages,
pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, cosmetics, logistics, premises, and slaughtering. Each
of these categories consists of different kind of standard and procedure to be followed as
stated by JAKIM itself. The global Halal market estimated at USD 2.3 trillion, of which
the pharmaceutical industry has a share of USD 0.5 trillion which represent 22 percent
of market share. Pharmaceutical industry is the second highest percentage after Food
industry in global Halal market. Pharmaceuticals also have many types such as drugs,
vaccines, prescription drugs and supplement. Nowadays, consumers become more aware
and educated about the ingredients in drugs or medicine they take for their health.
Most of the pharmaceuticals in market are not Halal-compliant (Halal Group
Industries PLC, 2011). Pharmaceuticals that contain alcohol (ethyl alcohol such as
methylated spirits and ethanol) and gelatin from bovine and porcine skin are non-Halal.
The most concern issues nowadays is the vaccine market which is lucrative since there is
a pressing demand for vaccines amongst the population which heads to Mecca for their
annual pilgrimage (Hajj). The existing vaccines for meningitis, hepatitis and
meningococcal are pork-based, thus the Malaysian Industry Development Corporation
(HDC), in collaboration with a Saudi Arabia-based partner, is now developing Halal
vaccines for such diseases.
As a way to control the use of non-Halal elements in pharmaceuticals, Malaysian
Standard provides to the pharmaceuticals manufacturing the standard known as Halal
Pharmaceutical General Guidelines (MS2424: 2012). This standard is referred for
inspection by the Pharmaceutical Inspection Cooperation Scheme (PIC/S): Guide to
Good Manufacturing Practice for Medicinal Products and Pharmaceutical Inspection
Cooperation Scheme (PIC/S): Guide to Good Manufacturing Practice for Medicinal
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Products Annexes (Malaysian Standard, 2010). In order to obtain Halal certification,

pharmaceutical companies need to follow all this kind of standard and procedure. When
the pharmaceutical companies introduced new drugs, JAKIM need to do an inspection
for the new drugs by doing clinical trials. This clinical trial has lot of consequences such
as:

It takes a longer time for the testing process of each ingredient in the

drugs.
The process for lab trial is costly.
It takes time for the pharmaceutical companies to find suitable

alternatives to replace non-Halal elements in those drugs.

Lack of data regarding the ingredients to produce vaccines. Data
regarding vaccines are not store properly in database, making JAKIM or
pharmaceutical companies difficult to know what are the ingredients used
in those drugs.

Most of pharmaceutical companies in United State using Big Data to develop

new drug, clinical trials and portfolio management. Big Data analytics can maximize
business efficiencies in sales and marketing strategies. Amongst the contribution that Big
Data can make for pharmaceutical companies is to improve decision-making. Big Data
can provide an analysis of both structured (data from prescriptions) and unstructured
data (data from social media). The Big Data are incredibly advance in information
technology (IT) and have different ways in which information and data can be captured.
Some forms of pharmaceutical companies using Big Data that generated in the form of
RFID and sensor data from medical devices and pharmaceutical manufacturing
organizations, raw data from various state-of-the-art machines that process blood
samples, tissues, and so on. This large volume of data can be processed using a Big Data
platform to support scientific analytics.
Mostly pharmaceutical companies in Malaysia still do not have a proper database
for them to store the information about the pharmaceuticals. In this research, we are only
focusing on Halal pharmaceuticals Vaccines. Since the volume of data gather from
these categories is not in terabytes, we will use Data Science term instead of Big Data.
Data Science is similar to Big Data, but the different is only their volume of data that we
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used. This Data Science concept we will implement it into Halal pharmaceutical focuses
on vaccines only. JAKIM as one of the authorities in Halal industry that have their own
database which gathers all related data about vaccines from the pharmaceutical
companies such as Chemical Company Malaysia (CCM), Upha Pharmaceutical
Manufacturing (M) Sdn Bhd, and Duopharma (M) Sdn Bhd. Data Science concept will
represent in the web-based where it displays all related data regarding vaccines
ingredients and listed it into Halal or Non-Halal. If JAKIM used this concept, it will
decrease the cost for clinical trials. They do not have to test the vaccines which have
suspicious ingredients thus only referring to the listing shown in the web-based. The data
that store in database also can help JAKIM to do a decision-making whether the
pharmaceutical companies are qualified to get Halal certification or not. By using Data
Science platform, JAKIM will have a proper ways to keep the data and always update
the data.

References
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Halal Group Industries PLC, 2011. Available from http://www.halawlindustries.com.

Malaysian Standard, 2010. Halal pharmaceutical - general guidelines. Department of
Standards Malaysia.