My name is Ben Faircloth. I'm regional head for LEK in Europe, and a senior partner in the healthcare practice. Working in healthcare and working often with private investors in healthcare, I'm privileged enough to see the trends in investment and the themes that are encouraging people to put money to work behind different healthcare businesses and opportunities, and one area that has seen a great deal of attention in recent years, and arguably has seen some acceleration due to macro forces underpinned by the effect of the pandemic, has been the area of pharma contract services. This is an area where LEK has a huge amount of expertise. We've been active in the space getting on for 15 years. And we have observed an ever growing interest from both strategic investors and private equity investors to find businesses, back strong assets, and invest further behind those assets to really encourage the development and commercialization of new therapeutic products.
Within the pharma contract service space, there are a number of trends that we have seen accelerated by the recent impact of the COVID pandemic. The first is that evermore money is flowing into life sciences. We've all seen, at both a personal and organizational level, the impact of new therapies on day to day life. And that's encouraged a great wave of innovation that is being supported by investors across the globe. We're also seeing technology coming into the space. We're seeing increased use of AI, for example, to help identify potential drug candidates and accelerate their progress into the clinic and commercialization thereafter. During the pandemic, we've seen really almost everybody get much more comfortable in using digital technologies to engage with their own healthcare and with healthcare practitioners. And that's very much a trend that pharmaceutical companies and pharma service businesses have been looking to take advantage of as they seek to navigate continued access restrictions to healthcare settings during the pandemic.
When I look forward into 2022, I think our pharma clients and our pharma contract service clients are facing some very clear questions that they want our support in addressing. On the one hand, there is unprecedented demand for therapeutics, both existing products, and of course, importantly, innovative new products. On the other hand, capacity is constrained. And that capacity is constrained whether we're talking about supply chains, which increasingly governments and societies want to see close to the point of use to ensure their security, but it's also constrained when we talk about people, the scientists who are going to develop the products, and the commercial experts are going to help explain their benefits to practitioners and to clinicians. So we are working closely with our client base to help them understand where the opportunities that best fit with their capability sets lie, and to think through how best to address those next year and beyond.
In 2022, there are a number of themes that are going to be of importance to our client base and therefore to LEK globally and regionally. Firstly, digital transformation is having a very material impact on our clients' businesses in all end markets and sectors. And secondly, the sustainability agenda is of crucial importance and growing importance, as we're all I think very aware. In fact, we have recently announced the development of a Global Center of Excellence for Sustainability, and that will be based in our London office and serving clients globally. In life sciences, and in healthcare more broadly, everyone is motivated by a desire to improve human health. And we certainly at LEK all believe passionately that we are supporting a very significant cause in helping our life science clients bring new products to market. When I'm asked what it is that helps set us apart from our competitors, I believe that it's our connectedness, our breadth of experience globally, and our depth of understanding of specific industries and end markets can be brought together by our globally and regionally collected culture for the benefit of our clients.
