Who will heal the healer?

Author(s): Gabriel de Paula

Pharma has a track record of achieving the impossible. Vaccines, ADCs, gene therapy, even previously ‘hopeless’ disease areas like dementia: we’re making blinding progress in many areas.

In this context, the byline we’ve chosen for this year’s Pharmageddon, ‘Pharma is sick’, might feel outrageous, even insulting, to some: have we ever been in ruder health?

It’s the stratospheric success in research that makes the stunted progress in other parts of our business model so frustrating. Look closer and it becomes clear that pharma is plagued with co-morbidities, fuelled by a pharma-specific mutation of corporate groupthink that is hurting our ability to get treatments to patients.

Our own polling found that 38% of medical directors spend 10–20% of their time on MLR rather than medicine, and a further 27% spend 21–30%. Meanwhile, our functions are bristling with powerful tools we lack the vision to use: only 22% of life sciences companies have successfully scaled AI, and just 9% are using it to any useful degree.

Almost everyone who works in pharma knows this. And yet, leaders are terrified of challenging the status quo. Rather than confronting challenges, we roll our eyes, shrug our shoulders and agree that ‘this is just how it is’.