When I leave my writer’s lair and go out into the world, I feel like the tortoise in a race of hares. People move around me at the speed of light, most lost in their screens, smiling at machines.
As usual, the BIO International 2017 Convention was a top-shelf event. This year’s show theme was, “breakthroughs.” And while I didn’t see a single breakthrough therapeutic take center stage at this year’s event, there were still a significant number of them worth noting. For example, in the first can’t-miss session listed in my pre-BIO blog, attendance nearly broke through the walls — literally. Not only was this session standing room only, it was the first time I experienced a non-keynote/non-super session have to utilize an overflow room so attendees could watch via live video.
Drug Sales Reel Amid Probe Into Charities. This was the headline of Jonathan Rockoff’s June 12, 2017, Wall Street Journal article that points out how sales for two U.S. “blockbuster prostate-cancer drugs” (i.e., J&J’s Zytiga and Pfizer’s Xtandi) were down (i.e., 14 and 11 percent respectively) for the first quarter from a year previous. Apparently there are two contributing factors that explain this drop in sales — a charitable-giving federal investigation, and how the companies have responded to patients in need.
As we get closer to one of our industry’s biggest annual gatherings, the BIO International 2017 Convention in San Diego, June 19 – 22, I have begun to pin down my schedule for which educational sessions I plan to attend. For me, this has always been a challenge, as BIO has so much great educational content. And with many of the educational sessions overlapping, I find I have to pick and choose where I want to be, often with at least two options from which to pick.
On April 25, 2017, I posted a blog asking the question, Who Is The Biopharmaceutical CEO Of The Year. In the blog, I included a link to a short survey. Our goal was twofold: see if there was enough interest in continuing to pursue such an award, and generate an initial list of names that would be in contention. Thus far, 10 names have been submitted via dozens of submissions, but it’s too early for us to make any decisions or conclusions based on such a small amount of data.
In March I attended The Conference Forum’s R&D Leadership Summit. One of the panels that provided a great deal of insight involved executives discussing how to assess and create value for patients, payors, regulators, and society. This event employs the Chatham House Rule, which means “Neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” Despite not being able to reveal that info, I still think the ideas that were shared will prove valuable.
With the BIO International 2017 Convention being just seven weeks away, your preparations as an attendee should be well underway. But until they arrive on-site, many people often overlook deciding what educational sessions to attend. And while BIO attendees can afford to take such an approach, speakers certainly cannot. As the past BIO educational planning co-chair, I can attest that a lot of work goes into pulling off a high-quality educational session at BIO. Consider the following example.
Orlando, the city of warmth and happiness by design, hosted the Endocrine Society’s annual ENDO event this year, overlapping the Washington, DC-hosted AACR, the yearly confab by the American Association for Cancer Research, by several days. I was determined to visit both shows.
I’ve been thinking, if you were going to name someone to be the biopharmaceutical industry CEO of the year, who would it be? But even more important than the who is the why. What criteria would you use? I’ve been looking through a bunch of articles that list top influencers for our industry, and the criterion for inclusion seems pretty subjective. There are media outlets that employ a variety of objective measures (i.e., company performance). And while perhaps better than a completely subjective approach, we all know that having great sales performance doesn’t necessarily make you a great leader. One of the best methodologies I have seen for naming a top CEO was done by the Harvard Business Review in 2015. It included financial data (weighted at 80 percent) and a measurement of a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance (weighted at 20 percent).
Not long ago I had the opportunity to go to an invitation-only event attended by some of the biopharmaceutical industry’s biggest thought leaders. At the time, Repeal and Replace of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a priority for the new administration. But now that it has failed, you might be wondering what else should folks in biopharma be paying attention to?
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