My reflections on collaboration and speed

The New Year is still starting out a bit different, but there is optimism in the air. I returned from the holidays with a clear head, ready to crystallize my thinking on what we want to achieve and define concrete steps for how to get there. The first few weeks have already been eventful and inspiring (including the first virtual #JPM2021 and upcoming #WEF), and things are continuing to move in the right direction toward the finish line.

A common thread that keeps coming up in my conversations is how crucial speed and collaboration were and are in managing the pandemic. Teaming up on big challenges has been a theme since I began my career as a medical products engineer, but more so now when patients’ lives depend on it. In this article I want to highlight a few inspiring examples from inside and outside of our walls from the past weeks and months that speak to the immense benefits of working together to develop transformative medicines and urgently bring them to patients in need.

So goes the African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I would even dare to take this up a notch and suggest that collaboration is a catalyst for going fast and far. Especially in an urgent situation when – for instance – a global pandemic strikes, all hands on deck are required for a quick and impactful response.

Internal collaboration

When we flipped the switch from office- to home-based work almost overnight last March, our teams embraced the challenge. They worked flexibly and collaboratively to keep clinical trials around the world going. We also got three Phase III, placebo-controlled trials of our own medicines to test promising hypotheses up and running within four to six weeks. Compared to the nine to 12 months this process would usually take, the speed of this effort is extraordinary and a true testament of a culture that empowers people to find new ways forward in a rapidly evolving landscape for developing medicines. (In the photo you can see the team behind one of these trials that met in person for the first time between COVID-19 waves in the summer after working together for three months.)

I talked more about our learnings from the pandemic in an interview with FierceBiotech two weeks ago.

It was also a pleasure to connect with Mike Rea for his podcast IDEA Collider to discuss what having a culture of innovation means to me, and how being inspired, curious and unbossed fuels innovation in all aspects of our drug development process.

Needless to say, speed and collaboration are crucial for the overall advancements in our pipeline, deep insights into mid-to-late stage assets were presented at the Meet Novartis Management event in November last year.

Collaborating with regulators

The speed and collaboration we’ve seen around developing vaccines and drugs for COVID-19 have been remarkable, and I’ve also been impressed by the steps taken by the regulators to accelerate review and approvals while still ensuring patient safety.

I had the opportunity to participate in the 2021 Innovations in Regulatory Science Summit, organized by the UCSF-Stanford CERSI. The event brought together leaders in academia, industry and regulatory sectors. I participated in a panel with Gideon Blumenthal, Martha Donoghue and George Yancopoulos, moderated by Laura Esserman and Peter Marks, focused on the development of novel therapies for cancer.

It was encouraging to hear many members of the panel across different sectors agree on key points. As new science and technology emerge, we need to work in even closer partnership with regulators as the current system is not set up for real-time interactions and the science is moving faster than the current regulatory paradigm. We have a common goal with the FDA, so additional communication, collaboration and alignment is needed for us to advance as quickly as science is advancing.

Collaboration vs. competition in the industry

Efforts around combatting COVID-19 have been by far the largest and fastest mobilization of global scientific capabilities against a public health crisis, including open science and cross-industry collaboration. Some of these collaborations have brought forward vaccines in a speed we would have never thought possible. 

We’re proud to be part of a number of collaborations ourselves, including the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, coordinated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard, as well as a COVID-19 directed partnership supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative.

In our labs at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, our researchers have started a robust and collaborative drug discovery effort to develop first intentional medicines for coronavirus. Together with our collaborators, we are targeting the main protease Mpro, which is part of the viruses’ self-replication machinery.

In order to accelerate drug discovery and development, I believe we need to be agnostic of the source of the science and focus on bringing the partners with the right capabilities on board in order to bring medicines to patients. During the pandemic we strengthened our external network of more than 300 academic and 100 industry alliances to explore opportunities to change the standard of care.

We’ve all hit the virtual ground running in 2021 and it’s our responsibility to keep up this pace and urgency. I wish you all a great start into the year, stay healthy and let’s keep working together.