COVID-19

What is your perspective on how the pharma industry has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? What lessons have been learned?

Drug Molecules

What two or three drug molecules do you identify as having had the greatest impact on society? What about on the pharmaceutical industry?

M&A

How would you characterize the current landscape of M&A activity in the pharmaceutical/biopharmaceutical industry?

2020s Technology

What technology do you foresee leading the industry over the coming decade, both in terms of real approvals and general impact?

Breakthrough Technologies

What breakthrough technologies have had a transformative effect on your business in 2019?

Roundtable Topics

COVID-19

Drug Molecules

M&A

2020s Technology

Breakthrough Technologies

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There has been a massive global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many pharmaceutical companies have been making significant efforts to develop tests, treatments, and vaccines for COVID-19. They are leveraging and sharing their profound scientific knowledge.

Thierry Durand, Ph.D.
Managing Director, Minakem

It has been impressive to see how fast the industry responded to the outbreak. Once the genome of the virus was discovered, many set out to shut down the viral replication with many different approaches.

Christa Myer
Senior Associate / Senior Pharmaceutical Specialist, CRB USA

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the complex landscape of the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.

Marco Taglietti
M.D., President & CEO, SCYNEXIS

The pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries have responded promptly to the COVID-19 pandemic challenge by evaluating possible utilization of available drugs, speeding the clinical testing for the new application for drugs originally developed for diseases with similar clinical signs and complications, and looking into more innovative approaches.

Daria Donati, Ph.D.
Director, Business Development and Innovation, Cytiva

The pharmaceutical industry responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in a responsible manner and is fully supportive of efforts of various governmental agencies in responding quickly to the challenges this pandemic represents.

Madhu Shaik, Ph.D.
Executive Director of R&D & Technical Services, Alcami

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Penicillin has had a significant impact on society and the pharmaceutical industry. As the first true antibiotic, it ushered in advances in therapeutic medicine.

Andrew Bulpin, Ph.D.
Head of Process Solutions, MilliporeSigma

Improvements in quality of life have largely come about through small, incremental advances in scientific understanding, translated into products and policies over many decades.

Adrian Wildfire
CEO, CHIMagents

In my view, the three drug types that have had the greatest impact on society are beta-lactam antibiotics, monoclonal antibodies, and beta-agonists, either for asthma or for cardiovascular disease.

Chris Moreton, Ph.D.
Vice President, Pharmaceutical Sciences, FinnBrit Consulting

Platform technologies that allow for the therapeutic delivery and actuation of genetic therapy will continue to transform medicine, with the greatest impact yet to be seen.

Jake Becraft, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Strand Therapeutics

As companies develop new treatments and vaccines and repurpose older drug products to fight COVID-19, the importance of excipients used, either in (bio)processing or formulation, cannot be forgotten.

Suzanna Brown
Global Marketing, BASF Pharma Solutions

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There is always going to be M&A going on in the biopharmaceutical space, given the ecosystem that exists between biotech and large pharma. It’s just part of doing business in our industry.

Anne Whitaker
Chief Executive Officer, Aerami Therapeutics

We’re excited about the pace of change both in terms of the number of new modalities and in the regulators’ approach, encouraging more development of therapies that answer unmet medical needs. And we’re starting to see the result of this in better patient outcomes.

Sarah Holland, Ph.D.
Head of Licensing, Lonza Pharma & Biotech

Due to its nature, the pharmaceutical industry will always see M&A activity. That is not likely to change anytime soon. However, the drivers behind it do change over time, based on the trends in the market.

Andrew Badrot
Chief Executive Officer, C2 PHARMA

The outsourcing industry is growing at an astonishing rate. There are still many M&A deals to be made as pharma companies offload legacy plants associated with traditional small molecule manufacturing, giving rise to consolidation and expansion.

Barbara Morgan, Ph.D.
Global Business Director, Pharmaceutical Solutions and General Manager, CDMO Division, Lubrizol Life Science Health

The average premiums at which companies were acquired is high, but the likelihood of recovering it via pricing of the end drugs is uncertain.

Dago Caceres
Global Strategic Marketing Leader, Pharma Solutions at DuPont

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Looking ahead, the industry will focus on data-rich techniques, such as mass spectrometry, to allow more critical quality attributes to be monitored in a single assay, improving process development.

Ashleigh Wake
Business Development Director, Intertek Pharmaceutical Services

Technology that contributes to driving down overall cost of care for both healthcare providers and patients while simultaneously improving clinical outcomes will drive the industry forward over the coming decade.

Timothy Moran
Chief Executive Officer, Motus GI

As these strategic trends evolve, I foresee an emphasis on much more integrated systems, collaborative systems and services, and the need for near real-time data sharing and decision support tools.

Rick Seibert
Chief Technology Officer, Sharp Services

Over the next decade, better data management technology, AI, and machine learning (ML) are poised to make a big impact on the pharmaceutical industry and its contributions to innovation in R&D.

Andrew Anderson
Vice President of Innovation and Informatics Strategy, ACD/Labs

Cellular engineering will increasingly rely on improving reprogramming technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas and other nuclease or transposon systems affording much better sensitivity and specificity.

Phil Vanek, Ph.D.
General Manager, Cell & Gene Therapy Strategy and Business Development, GE Healthcare Life Sciences

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Many of the change agents I have seen in 2019 are derived from changes in regulatory law, commercial downscaling, and impact from patent expiry strategies. The largest external regulatory change came from the issuance of the long-awaited EMEA Annex I, clarifying which technologies are required and acceptable, when and why.

Thom O’Sullivan
Director of Aseptic Process Technology, Process GS&T, IPS-Integrated ProjectServices, LLC

The challenges involved in biologic drug development differ greatly to those of small molecule drugs, and today’s innovators are more often focused on discovery, so they need to outsource other activities to progress programs.

Stacey Treichler, Ph.D
Group Product Manager, Catalent Biologics

The most exciting technological or scientific advancement that has influenced our business strategy in 2019 is our novel epigenetic regulator program. Unlike gene therapies, which target and modify DNA directly by inserting specific genes into patient’s cells, epigenetic regulators control or modify gene expression through processes that do not alter the sequence of DNA directly.

James E. Brown, D.V.M.
President and Chief Executive Officer, DURECT Corporation

One breakthrough technology that has had a transformative effect on our research and development efforts this past year has been advances in next-generation sequencing(NGS) technologies, including single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq).

Alexis Peyroles
Chief Executive Officer, OSE Immunotherapeutics

Although continuous flow has been utilized in a variety of industries for over a century, the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to adopt this technology for historical and regulatory reasons. The advantages that continuous flow has for chemical synthesis include both safety andefficiency, and there are a number of examples of pharmaceutical companies looking to leverage the technology for process improvements in clinical phase development.

Shawn Conway
Director of Engineering Research & Development, Cambrex

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