Amgen's Ian Thompson On Leadership And A Global Mindset
By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Riding for the British Cycling team was a foundational experience for Ian Thompson, SVP and general manager of U.S. business operations at Amgen. During a recent conversation about his 16-year tenure at Amgen, and what the future holds for one of biotech’s biggest success stories, Thompson consistently tied his approach to management and business strategy to lessons learned from cycling — uphill and down.
Leadership And Management Philosophy
Thompson described his leadership philosophy as consisting of four key areas: earning trust, building the best teams, getting the balance right between running and shaping the business, and a focus in recent years on continuous improvement, or what cycling coach and former British Cycling performance director David Brailsford called the “aggregation of marginal gains.” Continuous improvement and looking for marginal gains means paying attention to small things that ultimately become big things, says Thompson. It also includes an ability to sometimes “unlearn the past … what got me to today might not get me to tomorrow.”
Whether it’s your own boss, the people you lead, or external partners, “the thing we all crave is some degree of predictability and certainty,” says Thompson. Predictability in leadership doesn’t mean being boring; it means reacting in a consistent way to internal challenges and opportunities and being predictable with external partners about what you are trying to do and achieve.
Cycling helped to demonstrate the power of coaching, empowering, and stretching individual teammates, says Thompson. “I’m very much an advocate of situational leadership, recognizing that some people are absolutely empowered to run their own businesses, versus other situations where you’ve got to be a little bit closer … the ability to adjust your own altitude in running and shaping the business is key.”
Benefits Of A Global Mindset
By his count, Thompson as a regional general manager has led “close to 55 of Amgen’s markets around the world,” including in Latin America, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the U.S. “I appreciate the diversity of the younger markets I’ve had the chance to work in, and I think it’s helped me think more broadly as a leader in terms of finding a potential solution to a problem in a particular market.”
The biopharmaceutical industry is global by nature, and “research happens most seamlessly when it’s global, when academic institutions are collaborating with one another … when you can enable clinical trials internationally, you get the best data sets. You get the mix of patient types and ethnicities you’re looking for, to prove to the various regulatory agencies that you’ve done comprehensive studies,” says Thompson. “Supply chains are inherently global as well.”
“The joy of working in different parts of the world stems back to my cycling background, where I first got to travel internationally for sport, and found that I was fascinated by different parts of the world, different cultures, and different lifestyles,” says Thompson. “Moving around the world probably wasn’t the first thing on my mind when I started out as a [sales] representative, but as soon as that opportunity presented itself, I took it.”
That’s not to say Thompson and Amgen aren’t tuned in to the current geopolitical environment, and the Trump administration’s America First agenda. “We have significant investments in the U.S., and we continue to build out U.S. manufacturing,” something the company has been doing for “quite some time,” says Thompson. “I could argue that we’re a little bit ahead of the game,” he says, citing construction projects in North Carolina and Ohio.
Pipeline Highlights
Amgen only had four or five marketed products when Thompson joined the company in 2008. Now, the company has four product portfolio areas: general medicine, rare diseases, inflammation, and oncology. Thompson highlighted growth with Repatha in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, Evenity in osteoporosis and bone building, and Tezspire (partnered with AstraZeneca) in severe uncontrolled asthma, which is entering Phase 3 for COPD.
In oncology, Thompson talked up the launch of Imdelltra, the first DLL3-targeting bispecific T-cell engager (biTE) for small cell lung cancer, and promising data supporting Blincyto, another biTE antibody indicated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
In the general medicine portfolio, Thompson pointed to MariTide for obesity (currently in Phase 3 trials) and olpasiran, a siRNA therapy targeting Lp(a), a genetic risk factor for cardiovascular disease. In the rare disease portfolio, Amgen secured an FDA approval on April 3 for Uplizna, the first (and only) approved treatment for immunoglobin G4-related disease.
In the biosimilars category, Amgen generated $2.2 billion in revenue last year and aims to double that figure by 2030. “We decided to invest in biosimilars more than a decade ago, mainly because of our expertise in manufacturing complex proteins,” says Thompson. “I think we have just about perfected the process of bring a biosimilar to market … we have a 100% acceptance rate on first submission with regulatory agencies.” In the U.S., Amgen has managed to capture significant market share with biosimilars administered on the medical benefits side, but has faced challenges in the pharmacy benefits space, “where you’re working through the PBMs to negotiate access.” Amgen will continue to invest in biosimilar development for both the medical benefits and pharmacy benefits coverage areas, he says.
Thompson continues to enjoy cycling — now he mostly rides in the Santa Monica hills, where there are plenty of big climbs. And Amgen is a much larger and more complex business today than it was when Thompson joined in 2008. “It’s more challenging, but more rewarding as well.”