There’s a lot to obsess about in biotech.
It seems that every day, there’s a new advancement or technology that has seemingly endless ways of impacting the way we develop and deploy new medications. From revolutionary gene-editing technologies like CRISPR to learning more and more about the microbes that live in and on us, there’s a lot to get excited about.
On a recent trip to Boston for the annual BIO International Convention, we sat down with around a dozen top pharma executives to answer the question: what’s the one topic in healthcare they can’t get out of their brains these days?
From fascinating science to business challenges, here’s how executives responded.
Nerding out
Jay Bradner, the president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, didn’t have to think more than a few seconds before calling to mind his latest obsession.
“Targeted protein degradation.”
Targeted protein degradation is a way of using medicine to guide certain faulty proteins to the trash compactor in a particular cell. That way, you can remove the protein entirely rather than simply manipulate them.
“I am just transfixed by this new type of medicine that bind and destroy their protein targets rather than bind and modulate the protein targets,” Bradner said.
Feeling the competition from in and out of the industry
For pharmaceutical executives — particularly those tasked with finding companies working on interesting new treatments that could one day become a big blockbuster — the pressure is on to get creative. Younger companies are finding ways to get the capital they need to develop drugs fairly readily, either privately or on the public markets. With all of these financing options available, it’s making it more challenging for pharmaceutical companies to partner with them.
“The pharma rationale of ‘you should partner with us because we can give you $100 million’ is less compelling now because there are other avenues available,” Adam Keeney, the global head of external innovation and R&D strategy at Sanofi Genzyme, told Business Insider. It’s making pharma execs think differently about how to position their companies as attractive to potential partners.
Paul Biondi, the head of business development at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has been pondering ways to get more creative with the partnerships he forms with biotech companies to stay competitive. For example, in 2017, BMS acquired the cancer drugs biotech company IFM Therapeutics was developing. For other projects IFM Therapeutics was working on, including treatments for autoimmune conditions, BMS spun those into its own company, keeping the IFM name, and giving BMS certain rights to pick up the treatments as they get farther in development.
Biotech executives looking to hire scientists and industry experts are also increasingly finding themselves competing with major tech companies like Google for employees, Erin Lanciani, senior vice president of people and organizational strategy at Sage Therapeutics, told Business Insider. “It’s making it even more competitive for us,” she said. That’s besides the thousands of biotech companies also looking to hire the top folks in the Boston area.
Taking on outbreaks quicker
For Rip Ballou, the vice president and head of global vaccines R&D center, figuring out how to better respond to outbreaks is a topic that’s been on his mind for years, since the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
“We always seem to get to the response too late. What I obsessed about is figuring out how we can take some of these platform technologies and go much, much faster than what we could ever even think about previously,” Ballou said, referring to genetics-based vaccines that work differently from traditional vaccines. Ideally, he said, with enough focus, it could only take a matter of weeks to get a new vaccine ready.
“When you talk about the ability to go from genetic information to something in a vial in less than two months, that is a game-changer, and that would allow you to respond to an outbreak that is emerging and we don’t have anything for,” he said. For now, that potential is still “science fiction,” Ballou said.
An imbalance in drug development
Richard Pops, the CEO of Alkermes, finds himself in a less crowded area of biotech compared to his counterparts at cancer drugmakers.
That’s what’s been on his mind: “The mismatch between some of these major public health issues in the country and a lot of the R&D effort going on,” Pops said. Alkermes is the maker of Vivitrol, a drug used to treat opioid addiction, a crisis the US has been facing. While there are very few treatments in the works for addiction, there are more than 7oo cancer drugs in late-stage development.
Tackling cancer
Other executives are thinking about how far we still have to go to treat cancer.
“Let’s fix that,” said Ted Tisch, the chief operating officer at genetic engineering startup Synthego
Alicia Zhou, who heads up research at Color, a genetics testing startup that has tests for hereditary cancer risk, says her day-to-day work has her thinking about the impact of population-wide testing on cancer. Notably, there could be a way to keep people with mutations in BRCA 1 and 2 — the genes linked with a higher risk of ovarian, breast, and prostate cancer — from passing it down. That could in turn decrease many people’s risk of getting cancer.
“The idea that you could essentially eliminate BRCA-related cancers in a single generation, that’s awesome. That’s a huge opportunity,” Zhou. “The amount of good you could do for the world to get that done would be immense.”
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