Leading By Following — BayBio's Gail Maderis
By Wayne Koberstein, Executive Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @WayneKoberstein
BayBio’s [UPDATE: In 2015, the BayBio Institute became the California Life Sciences Institute, and BayBio merged with the California Healthcare Institute to become the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA).] survey and white paper, “Successful Public-Private Partnerships,” was the wellspring of our four-part series on best practices for collaborations between life science companies and patient/disease foundations in drug development. (See Part Four of the series in our September issue) Here the head of the San Francisco Bay area biotech-industry association offers perspectives on the survey’s origin, implementation, and results.
A strategic planning meeting in 2010 sparked an internal discussion at BayBio: “How can we help our member companies recognize the growing involvement of patients and patient foundations as key players in drug development and reach out for their support?” says Gail Maderis, BayBio’s president and CEO.
The group noted that many smaller companies lacked easy access to the disease foundations, and vice versa, and many disease foundations lacked access or even awareness of all the companies working in their area. BayBio thus decided to be an umbrella group, to help raise issues and bring people together so foundations would not have to reach out individually to specific companies. “Disease foundations want to remain somewhat objective, and they are sometimes sensitive to working with an individual company,” says Maderis. To get a “lay of the land,” the public-private partnerships survey was a logical option.
“One of the biggest surprises to me was when we asked the foundations whether pharma understood their full range of capabilities, and we asked the industry whether the disease foundations understood the drug development process. The majority of respondents on both of those questions said no, which is pretty scary, but people tend to compartmentalize. When you talk to companies that have had long-standing relationships with the disease foundations, it’s tremendously different: the disease foundations help them with financing, with their boards, with partnering, and their very credibility. And disease foundations have become much more acutely aware of bottlenecks in drug development. There has been a tremendous amount of learning on both sides just by way of collaborating.”
Maderis saw another survey finding as especially insightful: an industry respondent wrote “Reach out to the foundations before you need them.” She advises companies not to wait until they apply for a grant. “If you’re developing a product in a given disease area, get in touch with the relevant foundations, get to know them.” She notes pharma companies that were pioneers in alliance management have alliance-management training courses for industry/industry collaborations, and now her group is talking to the companies about setting up a similar management training course for industry/foundation partnerships, as well as educational tools and seminars for its member companies.
“We continue to see high interest among companies in working with the disease foundations along with an increase in collaborations. We are going to have to work more closely together to solve these intractable healthcare problems. Even the FDA embraced patient-focused drug development in the last PDUFA, and disease foundations are becoming more vocal advocates for patient access to drugs. All of the components of the healthcare ecosystem are converging, and it makes sense to see increasing interaction between the disease foundations and the industry.”