The future of medicine is here

We’re at a turning point in the history of medicine.

Science and technology are advancing at an unprecedented pace, and we have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before. They are leading to breakthroughs in healthcare and medicine—and only in stepping back and considering the full arc of human progress in medicine can we truly recognize the extraordinary moment we’re in.

These developments come at an important time, as meeting the opportunity to improve human life remains more necessary than ever. Even today, the vast spectrum of disease remains largely untreated. We’re currently only able to significantly impact less than 10% of the 7,000-8,000 diseases known to affect humans.

?As science advances, so will the biopharmaceutical industry and the medicines we create—and if we innovate and work across sectors in the right ways, we’ll translate that science into lasting, meaningful progress.

A 120-year innovation arc

The modern biopharmaceutical industry came to form in the late 1800s, and for the better part of a century, we primarily used chemicals to modulate functions in the body. At the beginning, we still didn’t fully understand the inner workings of cells or how diseases progressed.

Science and industry pushed forward, and as we learned more about the biology of health and disease, we created better, safer, more effective chemicals, today called small molecule drugs.

Then, roughly 40 years ago, science led to a breakthrough. Protein therapies and monoclonal antibodies allowed us to modulate the activity of specific proteins—a sea change in our ability to go after the exact molecular drivers of disease.

These were and still are central contributors to improving life expectancy and quality of life, and alongside traditional vaccines, they were essentially the only kinds of medicines brought forward by the industry in its first 120 years.?

Scientific progress at a historic pace

Today, we’re probing human biology at its most fundamental levels, and coupled with technological advancements, we’ve created entirely new, unprecedented ways to intervene in disease. In just the past few years, multiple new types of treatments—a new generation of medicines—have been approved and are reaching patients, including RNA therapies, RNA vaccines, cell therapies, gene therapies, and radioligand therapies.

Juxtaposed against early advances in science, innovation’s pace is dramatically accelerating. Just a few years after Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on CRISPR-Cas9, a method to edit DNA, we’re exploring DNA and RNA gene and base editing to make new medicines. Its breakneck pace could shape an exciting future in which we could have an even greater impact on patients’ lives.?

The journey of specificity

We’re not just coming up with more treatment options and technologies—the science is getting more specific. As we understand more of the inner workings of our cells, we’re able to correct the biological roots of disease more precisely.

Drugs from our industry’s early days were generally nonspecific. Some went inside the cell, while some stayed outside the cell. In our current era, we're able to affect the inner machinery of the cell. For the first time in the history of medicine, we have the ability to impact the entire continuum of cellular machinery—to interact with what is essentially the source code of the human cell.

We’ll likely be able to combine treatments across that continuum, mixing and matching modalities to find new solutions for the most intractable diseases. We’re already able to combine radiotherapy and targeted therapies in a way that allows us to deliver ultra-precise radiation directly to tumors in some cancers. And many more exciting possibilities are on the horizon. Imagine if we could treat sickle cell disease by fixing the errant gene that causes it? Novartis is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to not only realize that ambition, but also to find ways to ensure a breakthrough innovation like that, which could completely change the current treatment paradigm, would be accessible to patients in need, including the large patient population across sub-Saharan Africa.?

?Industry’s next chapter: focus and expertise

As we look toward the healthier future within reach, we know business is key to translating science into widespread human progress. This is a longstanding truth underscored throughout the pandemic, and the leadership and innovation power of our industry will continue to benefit humankind.

In response to the rapid pace of innovation, we’re seeing companies focusing and investing to ensure they can translate scientific advances into impacts people can feel in their everyday lives. Novartis, for example, has executed over $100 billion in transactions in the past four years to focus our company while building capabilities across advanced technologies in medicine.

The companies that will last and lead in this next chapter will be the ones who build unique capabilities across the entire organization, from R&D to advanced manufacturing. Because in most cases, the new medicines coming to the fore are tremendously complex. Not every company can reprogram disease-causing errors in a patient’s cells or manufacture a single injection that corrects a faulty gene.?

A changing healthcare ecosystem

It’s up to the biopharmaceutical industry to parse new technologies, figure out which advances work best for certain diseases and patient groups and, with effective collaboration across health systems and sectors, help ensure patients who need access have access to the latest biomedical innovations, regardless of geography, economic status, or anything else.

The pace of innovation risks outpacing the ability to deliver the newest medicines to patients. To meet the ecosystem where it is to facilitate both innovation and access will require new and closer collaborations with academia and government. We must collectively bring our best to the work of reimagining medicine and ensuring health systems are prepared to deliver new kinds of medicines. It has and will continue to challenge our industry’s approach to bringing medicines to patients, including novel approaches to pricing and more. This is something I hope to share more thoughts on soon.

In it for the long haul

As evidenced by the 120+ year innovation arc of our industry, this is a long-term endeavor. Progress will come both incrementally and in watershed moments that feel like progress has arrived all at once. Like all efforts to push the boundaries of our understanding of life, there will be failures that lead to important learnings along the way. ?

Nothing about this is easy. It requires courage for companies to change and do things that have never been done before. But we keep going. We invest, we learn, we become stronger, and we grow.

I believe companies who do this consistently will innovate and lead for decades, perhaps even centuries to come, and will ultimately have the greatest impact on humanity.

They won’t just participate in the future of medicine—they will shape it.?