Written by The Pharmageddon Team • Published on 15th January 2025
Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, once said ‘to produce a mighty novel, you must choose a mighty theme’.
In pharma, we would do well to borrow Melville’s literary advice: anyone can see that we can achieve mighty things, but our potential won’t mean anything if we can’t set our sights on a bold, audacious mission.
That’s what the first of the 4As in the Pharmageddon cycle represents: Audacity. It’s where our theme starts (find a full explanation of the 4As on the Pharmageddon blog).
You might think pharma’s bread and butter, saving lives, is already audacious enough. But in 2025, that’s not good enough. The power of new technologies, the shifting ground of patient perspectives and a changing business environment have changed the nature of our work. We need a new direction and we need to be audacious to find it.
Audacious thinking is something totally alien to us in pharma, but it’s mainstream elsewhere. The simple premise is that it’s better to think big and shrink ideas down to size than it is to think small and build them out. Doing this in a healthcare context gets us to some interesting places.
For example, we are on the cusp of designing real-life avatars of patients, allowing us to measure the long-term impact of specific life choices. This will fundamentally change our definition of patients, turning the disease–treatment nexus into a narrative where individuals can consider the real-time impact of their health choices. We should use this chance to overturn the delivery of health solutions and transform the whole concept of preventative health.
Right now, some entrepreneurs are drilling chips into human brains, restoring movement to paralysed patients. This is a chance to consider a new kind of augmentation that goes beyond medicine.
Computers are designing drugs for us now. We can use this technology to not just accelerate the development of treatments we were already working on but use it to take on a broader brief, to fix problems that weren’t worth fixing before, and to create a new breed of life-lengthening, health-improving products.
There are also many reasons, from ethical concerns to societal consequences, why we shouldn’t do any of the above. We can stop innovation any time by saying that what we’re doing is outlandish, unrealistic, uncalled for, or dangerous.
But if we're going to do extraordinary things, we need extraordinary goals. That’s why we need to be audacious to find our mighty theme. It doesn’t mean we have to do everything we talk about, but it does mean we have to talk about everything. All-encompassing objectives that are bigger than just one discipline.
Will we use the opportunities open to us to simply streamline the status quo, or think audaciously to try to upend it? Will we slowly die on the path we are on, or will we find fresh energy by heading in a different direction?
Do you have your answer ready? Are you ready to be audacious?
Well, you’re in luck. You’re through to the waiting list.
Register your interest for Pharmageddon now.
The Pharmageddon Team
Email Lucy Osborne at [email protected]
Thanks for being keen to join us in New York.
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 Lucy on [email protected].
We also have a limited number of spaces for HCPs, media and others. Please write to Paul on [email protected] if eager to take part.
