Partners.
Partners.
Media Partners.
Pharma spends its life trying to change the behaviour of doctors, patients and health systems. Now, pharma is the patient.
The symptoms are familiar: risk aversion, customer abstraction, content overload, slow adoption, weak trust, committee logic, sameness in leadership and a habit of mistaking internal approval for real-world effect. This is an industry built around treatment, evidence and behaviour change, yet it often struggles to treat its own chronic conditions.
Over two days, the audience becomes the clinical team. recovery: scientists, clinicians, specialists, behavioural experts and second-opinion thinkers. Your job is to examine the symptoms, challenge the lazy diagnoses, identify what is still working and prescribe interventions the patient might actually follow.
In this case, the prognosis depends on the honesty of the consultation and the willingness to accept treatment.
From 9am
The first day examines the patient properly. This is not a wellness check or a generic transformation conversation but a serious attempt to distinguish symptoms from causes, failed treatments from promising interventions, and comforting self-diagnosis from clinical reality.
[LEARN]
Paul Simms opens with the patient history: an industry with exceptional science, expertise and resources whose breakthroughs too often produce less adoption, trust and external movement than they should — a discussion on 'peak science' and how adoption is the critical component of our industry's ongoing success.
The audience adds its own experience to the clinical record. Three doctors then offer competing diagnoses of the patient's underlying condition and challenge one another's evidence. The session ends with three provisional diagnoses that the rest of Day One will investigate.
[LEARN]
A promising proposition enters the organisation. As it passes through planning, review, alignment and approval, its original force disappears. The doctors examine where the deterioration occurs — fear, distorted incentives, weak decision rights, excessive process, or an idea that was never strong enough to begin with — and must prescribe one change capable of preserving the proposition's force.
A deep dive into the chronic conditions undermining pharma from within: committee logic, career risk, performative alignment and the standard brand-planning cycle.
[LEARN]
[LEARN]
Pharma doesn't lack patient or HCP research. The problem is what happens when that evidence contradicts a strategy already taking shape. Findings are summarised, reconciled and absorbed, while the plan continues largely unchanged.
The doctors examine where external reality loses its influence, and must identify one familiar explanation to rule out and prescribe a decision that patient or HCP evidence should be capable of stopping, redirecting or reopening.
[LEARN]
[LEARN]
Pharma is prescribing AI for almost every condition. It is expected to improve insight, accelerate evidence, personalise engagement, reduce costs and increase productivity. But a treatment can also mask symptoms or create new complications.
The doctors examine whether AI is changing the underlying model, or simply allowing pharma to produce more content, analysis and apparent personalisation without better judgement or stronger relationships — settling a working diagnosis, ruling out an overstated benefit, and identifying the first-line treatment.
Concurrent sessions where commercial and medical teams examine specific conditions within their own operating environments. Each consult must produce a working diagnosis and a possible intervention.
Care increasingly happens at home, in pharmacies, through digital services and within ordinary family routines. The doctors examine where the familiar commercial model stops fitting, and what pharma should provide instead — access, infrastructure, service, or a different form of practical support.
HCPs receive more scientific material than they can absorb, and AI systems increasingly digest and interpret that material before an MSL enters the conversation. The doctors examine whether the problem is excessive volume, poor sequence, fragmented evidence, or a medical model that still measures production rather than usefulness.
As AI-generated content floods the market, polished corporate outreach is losing its force. The session identifies what human 'costly signals' still cut through, and how to build them in systematically.
Clinical trial logic and real patient behaviour rarely match, but the data sets built from them will never admit it. The session looks at where behaviour gets smoothed over or lost in translation, and what would make the evidence more impactful.
[LEARN]
[EXPLORE]
Panellists tell short, candid stories about a moment when they saw an accepted way of working failing and chose to intervene: what they saw, what they said or did, what it cost, and what changed. The intervention points produced throughout the day are brought together into a single map, showing where treatment repeatedly needs to enter the organisation. Each table then selects one intervention point and writes a handover brief for Day Two.
[EXPLORE]
What happens when pharma goes home? Each attendee identifies the part of the patient they can realistically influence, the conversation waiting for them back at work, and records the condition they want to treat, the decision that needs to change, and the people they'll need to work with.
From 9am
Yesterday we diagnosed the conditions.
Today we treat them.
The clinical team now moves from analysis to intervention: what should be prescribed, what should be tested, what should be stopped and what would make the patient actually adhere?
[LEARN]
Leaders from banking, transport, infrastructure and other constrained industries explain how their organisations changed under pressure: what had become unsustainable, what was initially misdiagnosed, and what had to change structurally. This is an examination of whether scale, regulation and legacy systems genuinely make substantial change impossible.
[LEARN]
[LEARN]
Panellists examine the AstraZeneca 'Judgy' advert as a practical example of a team putting a distinctive idea into the world early enough for customer reaction to shape the work — the tension that prompted it, the internal resistance, and the decisions that changed as a result.
Concurrent treatment-board sessions developing operational interventions within functional lines.
Commercial and marketing teams are routinely asked to be distinctive, while working within systems that reward predictability and easily approved ideas. This session examines how teams can work with customers earlier and more directly to discover what people will support, resist or help improve — identifying the incentives, leadership behaviours and decision rights needed for calculated risk to become normal practice.
Medical teams are right to set a high bar, but caution can become inertia when every new approach is judged by yesterday's conventions. This session examines how medical can work more directly with HCPs and patients to test emerging ideas and turn evidence into practical action, while preserving trust and rigour.
More innovation is emerging from biotechnology companies, technology platforms, academic partnerships and other external ecosystems. This session examines how commercial and marketing should help identify external potential, shape propositions earlier, and build the conditions for adoption at scale.
Medical affairs is entering a world in which AI agents can retrieve, interpret and challenge evidence before an MSL enters the conversation, while important science increasingly comes through alliances and external research networks. This session asks which activities should be automated, where medical expertise becomes more valuable, and how the function maintains authority over the science.
[LEARN]
[LEARN]
Pharma is usually good at responding once a new technology, customer behaviour or policy shift becomes impossible to ignore — by then, the organisation is often adapting under pressure. This session looks further ahead: as innovation moves beyond company boundaries, AI changes how evidence is interpreted, field roles are redesigned and public expectations evolve, which capabilities will pharma need before they appear in an annual plan or job description?
[LEARN]
A treatment can be approved enthusiastically and still produce no change. It reaches enablement, content, channels, workflows and customer-facing teams, where it is diluted or absorbed into business as usual.
What must happen in the first 30 days after pharma’s new direction is agreed? Where does ownership need to sit? What has to stop? Which operating habit must change first? And how quickly should customers notice the difference? Leaders responsible for sales enablement, omnichannel engagement, scientific communications and HCP experience examine the next decision, and first dose, that we need.
[EXPLORE]
Preparing the outpatient treatment plan. Every attendee returns to the real organisational case recorded at the end of Day One, selects one intervention and turns it into a short internal proposal. Attendees then form accountability pods, present their proposal, receive a challenge and plan the first conversation they will have after the event.
Gabriel de Paula Director of Operations (Events & Community) | Pharmageddon Europe Event Leader
Partners.
Media Partners.
Thanks for being keen to join us in Amsterdam.
Our intention is to have one non-affiliated ‘patient’ for each team taking part.
If you are interested in being one of these, please write to us. We also have a limited number of spaces for HCPs, media and others. Please write to Gabriel on [email protected] or [email protected] if eager to take part.
