Covid-19. An opportunity for Big Pharma to change the calculus on industry reputation?

A colleague returned to our UK office this morning, straight off the red-eye from Boston after attending one of the main Biotech partnering conference, organised by a leading investment bank. Boston was quiet, the aeroplane was quiet......the conference was quiet! Some keynote speakers and companies scheduled to present their results, had cancelled. It's not just the Biotech sector being impacted by Covid-19. Several major PharmaCo's have already introduced bans on all but essential business travel and numerous international conferences and congresses are currently under review or have already been cancelled. The tentacles of Covid-19 are spreading rapidly.

I posted something at the back end of 2019 about Biotech headwinds beginning to blow against what has been an amazing bull run for Biotech and Big Pharma over the last ten years. One of the harbingers of that change, was the US Government's increasingly hostile stance on the perceived profits of Pharma and a consequent downward pressure on drug pricing. The Hill believes that higher prices for drugs in the US when compared to Europe/ROW, is in effect, subsidising ROW and defacto, funding European medical innovation...... they are probably right but that is a whole other article! But could the Covid-19 crisis change the calculus surrounding society's poor opinion of Big Pharma and in addition, raise the profile of the more agile and innovative Biotechs, who aren't household names...………...yet.

There is a well known saying in journalism about not letting facts get in the way of a good story. A recent study by JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) compared the profitability of large Pharmaceutical companies with other large public companies and the findings might surprise you. The profits of the 35 large PharmaCos included in the analysis when compared to 357 large, non pharmaceutical companies were indeed greater, but the differences were less pronounced when controlling for differences in company size, investment in research and development and time.

So are the tectonic plates in terms of societal perception of the industry beginning to move and could Covid-19 provide a jump off point for a whole new paradigm shift in that relationship?

President Trump chaired the first meeting of the rapidly established Covid-19 task force at the White House at the end of February. The task force features luminaries from Big Pharma including Emma Walmsley (GSK), Mikael Dolsten (Pfizer), John Shiver (Sanofi) and David O'Day (Gilead) amongst others.

Joining the Big Pharma leviathans on the task force, are leaders from the Biotech industry, representing companies perhaps less well known, including Stephane Bancel (Moderna), Leonard Schleifer (Regeneron) and Joseph Kim (Inovio). My point being, that when it comes to sense of urgency, being fleet of foot and delivering innovation, Biotech, quite literally, has a seat at the table with more traditional 'Big Pharma'.

In my previous incarnation as Head of Fun & Games at global media and publishing organisation, PharmaTimes, I had the pleasure of chairing a number of high level steering committees comprised of senior industry leaders in Clinical Research, Marketing, Medical Science Liaison, Sales Management amongst others. The competition steering committees were tasked with creating competency based processes to recognise and celebrate exemplars of best practice from within their relevant functional areas. What always struck me, was that those same companies that competed fiercely out in the market place, collaborated brilliantly when working towards a shared goal...…...in this case to recognise and celebrate great people. Imagine if the whole industry could come together in the same way and collaborate to conquer Covid-19 - what change could that deliver to society's perceptions of the industry?

Must be serendipity, but as I am penning my musings on Covid-19, one of our strategic partners, Buchanan, Ingersoll $ Rooney (the go-to for all things legal in Life Sciences in the US) sent me a nice little summary on preparing for Covid-19 in the workplace...……...enjoy and stay safe.

As ever - delighted to get your comments.