Who Will Move Biopharma Beyond The Cutting Edge At BIO 2016?

By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL

When you think of companies that revolutionized the way business is done, it is important to consider the attributes of their founders. Often they had gained life experience from working in businesses best be described as tangential to those they eventually disrupted. As a result, these “outsiders” not only brought a different perspective toward tackling problems in these industries, their wisdom to do things differently than in the past resulted in ideas that forever changed the world. For example, Malcom McLean was the founder of a trucking company. However, his 1950s concept of containerization (i.e., using standardized shipping containers to seamlessly move cargo from truck to ship to train) not only reduced the cost of loading a ship from $5.86/ton to 16 cents/ton, but made the global selection of products we enjoy today possible. Ray Kroc was a traveling food-processing equipment salesman before spawning the fast food industry via the franchising of McDonald’s. Apple’s founder Steve Jobs not only played a significant role in bringing personal computing to the masses resulting in the obsolescence of the typewriter, he also helped transform both the music and cellular communications industries. There are countless other examples of outsiders having a transformative impact beyond the industry where they got their start, and it makes me wonder — who or what from the periphery will eventually alter the way biopharma business is presently done?

A Total Different Approach To Creating A Super Session At BIO

Though this is a subject I have pondered for a while, it has been more top of mind lately as I prepare for one of our industry’s biggest annual events — the 2016 BIO International Convention in San Francisco this June. You see, I have the honor of moderating a super session titled, Beyond the Cutting Edge: How to Enable Life Science Organizations Today for the Societal Challenges of Tomorrow. When putting together the panel, our goal was to make this BIO session unlike any that had ever previously been done, with a bent toward bringing in a variety of very different perspectives. For example, the lone biopharmaceutical industry representative, Kemal Malik, comes from Bayer AG. A board of management member with responsibility for innovation and the Latin America region, Malik has spent 21 years at a company that seems to quietly go about its business, yet consistently finds itself ranked among the likes of Apple and Google as a company that has changed the world. Interestingly, of the top-20 largest biopharmas in the world, only Bayer (ranking #13) has business units spanning agricultural, animal, and human sciences.

In December 2015, Alphabet, Google’s holding company, revealed a new name for the company’s Life Sciences division: Verily. In an unprecedented coup, the Beyond The Cutting Edge super session will be the first in BIO’s history to have an executive panelist hailing from Verily, Chief Medical Officer, Jessica Mega, M.D. Ever wondered how Google might approach conducting a clinical trial? Perhaps now we might find out. Other panelist include:

• Jeremy Springhorn, (replacement for Noubar Afeyan who had a last minute travel conflict) partner corporate development for Flagship Ventures, a company responsible for cofounding over 30 life science and technology startups.
• Matthew Meyerson, M.D., Ph.D., currently serving in multiple research and teaching roles at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
• John Nosta, founder of the digital think tank NOSTALAB, member of the Google Health Advisory Board, and author of articles for Forbes Health Critical, a top global health and technology blog.

The Importance Of An Outsider’s Perspective

Given the terrible diseases being tackled by biopharmaceutical companies today, there can be little doubt that this is an industry at the forefront of working on the cutting edge. But tackling other biopharma challenges presently being faced, such as developing innovating therapeutics at a price and cost we can all afford, might benefit from an outsider’s perspective — especially if we ever hope to push our industry to a point somewhere beyond that of the cutting edge. Someone who knew this all too well was the late Andy Grove.

The 1997 Time magazine Man of the Year and former CEO and chairman of Intel, also wrote the 1996 best-seller, Only the Paranoid Survive. One my favorite stories within the book’s pages involves Grove coming to appreciate the importance of having an outsider’s perspective. During the 1980s, Intel was facing heavy competition from Japanese technology companies, and members of management were doing some serious soul searching. “I remember a time in the middle of 1985, after this aimless wandering had been going on for almost a year,” he wrote. “I was in my office with Intel’s chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary. Our mood was downbeat. I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and asked, “If we got kicked out, and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why don’t you and I walk out the door, come back in and do it ourselves?” Such moves often sound so easy when being read in a book. But it takes a lot of gumption to decide to walk away from what was once a core business. “If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity,” wrote Grove. “They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That’s what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to the job.”

If you look down the various lists of companies that have changed the world, you will find some that no longer exist, such as Pan Am or RCA. And though Pan Am shut down in 1991, RCA’s spirit lives on beyond its pioneering work in radio receivers and television sets in the broadcasting network it created — NBC. When I think about how I perceived Honda in my youth child, it was a motorcycle company. Today however, Honda is an engine company. Days of my childhood saw Exxon as an oil company, while today it is striving to become an energy corporation. Perhaps the successful biopharmas of the future won’t be viewed as companies that merely develop drugs, but comprehensive healthcare companies. For a model of what this might look like, consider Korea’s tech giant Samsung, which not only creates healthcare technologies, but even has a state of the art medical center as well.