Two days. Back to school.
Pharma has spent decades learning the wrong lessons, but not learning from them. Get sign off, follow the plan, benchmark against a competitor who’s benchmarking against you. Mistake internal approval for real-world effect.
Patients are still waiting, and science isn’t enough.
This is the lesson plan pharma never had. Over two days, the room stops taking notes and starts rewriting the curriculum, deciding what to unlearn, and what the industry should have been studying all along.
Stop copying pharma’s homework, bring your own answers.
All times are Philadelphia local time (ET).
It’s time to forget the so-called ‘rules’ of pharma. Rewrite the lessons, scrawl over the notebooks, graffiti the corridors. Let’s unlearn!
The pharma industry as we know it will not exist in the next few years. From micro changes in how AI is changing how we work from day to day, to macro changes like rapid drug discovery and new approaches to healthcare. To begin our process of unlearning, we’ll first ask: what kind of organisation will we be working in pharma in five years’ time?
Are we about to witness a fundamental shift in pharma marketing? As HCPs increasingly rely on LLMs to search for products, there’s a dawning possibility that our marketing departments will look very different very soon, with customer decisions based on a model that chooses the best medicine based on patient, payer and price, taking in very little pharma input. In a world like that, the only differentiating factor between our brands will be evidence. Voices on both sides of the aisle come together to have the debate.
AI can now make drugs, from discovery right though to production. That’s great news on many levels, especially in allowing us to focus on previously neglected diseases. But with so many products in our pipelines, what kind of stress will this put on pharma’s commercial model? This session will help you put in place plans for an emerging future that will be too much for our current setup.
Has digital gone too far? We’re not calling for cuts to pharma’s digital operations, but AI will soon be calling the shots on what medicines we buy and how. At the same time, healthcare will always be a trust-based exercise and key decisions will still be made by humans. Experts from across pharma’s engagement functions will talk you through the risks associated with digital engagement in the new era and help you rethink reachout with trust in mind, not just metrics.
The whole of medical science has been dominated by a flawed perspective on the human body. Since the days of Imhotep and Hippocrates, the male body has been the model for the therapies we made for humans. But humans aren’t all men. And female bodies behave in ways that are fundamentally different. Relearn what you knew about sex and reshape healthcare for the half of our species that medicine has always forgotten.
What’s that I hear at the back of the class? Are those rumours about China starting to dominate the healthcare market in everything from discovery to frontline care? From biotechs to hospitals, Chinese brands are gaining ground on US counterparts. Consider the real reasons behind Chinese success, understand the problem and put in place a plan to turn this competition to our advantage.
Has there ever been a time in this history of pharma when our leaders have bigger decisions to make? We are right to be excited about the future, but we also have a responsibility to consider the unintended consequences of what we’re doing: invent the car, you get a traffic jam; invent social media, you get teenage suicides. Learn how to build the right questions into bold ideas without slowing them down.
The kids have taken over. What does pharma look like, now the rebels are in charge?
It’s never been easier to be a tech bro. How easy is it to become a pharma bro? At the beginning of Day 2 you will embark on the ultimate thought experiment: building a pharma company from scratch. All you’ve got is a promising candidate and access to a decent tech stack. In teams, you will work out what you need to pull in patients and get it to market by coordinating new systems and ignoring legacy obstacles. Gain a sense of all the excuses we make to stop doing new things and the perspective of how easy it could be to build our organisations with the tools now on the market.
Pharma is in the business of making medicines, but some of the most dynamic innovations are now coming out of medtech. In this session, the most creative leaders in this space line up to talk about their breakthroughs, helping identify the most promising points of collaboration between them and you.
There is lots of stuff that we shouldn’t be doing in pharma. We know that. But there’s a lot more that we can and should be doing within the rules. When the clever, creative kids come up with interesting games, we should be finding ways to say yes, not no. Find ways to stay on the right side of regulatory review while preserving innovation.
Who do we really work for? Pharma pretends it’s set up for patients, but is that really the case? So much of the time, we optimise for other parts of the pharma ecosystem, like payers and investors. Time to work out the quick wins we can’t see to make our programs work for patients and doctors, from the patients and doctors themselves.
Patients are running out of trustful sources, despite having more ways of accessing them than ever. It might sound ludicrous to think that pharma could ever fill that gap, but we still have recognizable brands and effective medicines. This lesson will teach you how to make patients and doctors trust you and provide you with actionable tactics to rebuild trust with core customers.
Organisations find it harder to innovate for myriad reasons. They don’t have the tech expertise, they’re set in their ways and, often, they generate big sales. This last point is the most damaging. Money can be a curse in pharma, being a reason to continue without innovating. This session teaches you how to stay innovative when you’re on top.
Congratulations: you’ve graduated from the school of rebels. Time to plan for the future, taking in everything you’ve learnt and unearnt. In the final lesson, you’ll think about packaging your education to start the rebellion in your own company.
Email Lucy Osborne at [email protected]