Could do better
In years gone by, pharma people have privately told me that they didn’t think our industry was anywhere near where it could be.
Given the impressive advances in therapies across a host of conditions, these were astonishing confessions but reflected a general malaise with accepting the status quo instead of ‘rocking all over the world’.
It has, perhaps, taken the digital era, AI disruption and a COVID-shaped existential crisis for our industry to fully comprehend its own potential. This three-pronged fork to the backside has sent us all cartwheeling into a future we could not have envisaged.
There are countless examples in pop culture of people who, at the top their game, should have headed for a breathtakingly high summit but instead chose to defy their own promise, while settling onto the bar stool of ‘what might have been’.
At his peak, George Best went to play for Hibernian, Damien Hirst stopped making interesting statements about art/economics in order to focus purely on economics and Orson Welles voiced the character of Optimus Prime in the Transformers television series. They must serve as a warning!
Indeed, we must use the three-pronged fork – the will to win within – to change gear and become navigators in flight; zig-zagging the admittedly annoying regulatory terrain, super-charging R&D, igniting R&D and futurising clinical trials.
Pharma has a chance to shape its destiny – to be ‘prime pharma’.
Enjoy the magazine!
