During my visit to Thailand, I was privy, not only to the particularly innovative research goals being pursued, but also to a number of challenges the country has recognized and hopes to address within the next few years to encourage a stronger, more diverse industry.
A few weeks ago, I was invited by the Thailand Board of Investment to attend a media trip to learn about the country’s budding life sciences industry. Entering Thailand, a country in which the government is pushing more investment and education in the sciences, was even more striking and meaningful to me given the current scientific climate in the U.S.
In the spirit of this list-making season, I compiled what I thought were the five most important biosimilar-related triumphs in the past year. Many of these events were widely covered by the media and will play an influential role in how the biosimilar industry unfolds through 2017 and beyond.
Pfizer's Bernie Huyghe and ADC Therapeutics' Michael Mulkerrin get bushwhacked with this question in a public forum. Their open replies will help each one of you to your own personal assessment. Be prepared for some soul searching.
Relocating an organization as large as the EMA, which employs upwards of 1,000 people in London, will be no easy feat. As such, IDA Ireland, an agency that supports companies in Ireland and promotes foreign direct investments in the country, is working to compile information on why Ireland would be a good location for the EMA.
Understanding what went before, and the steadfast resolve to get to the future, are invaluable for reaching success in our industry. An illustrative and teaching example of this – including the past and future of outsourcing – is embodied in the people at a “thirty-year-old biotech.” They have little in common with Thomas Jefferson.
Louis Demers of Xoma knows what he wants in contract development and manufacturing organizations. For example, they should be networked with other service providers, and in mission-critical alignment. Can he get what he wants? Can any outsourcing leader at a biotech today? CMO consolidation may make it more difficult.
It used to be Pharma swept up emerging companies and their new technologies. Now CMOs do so as well. With Pharma, the technologies might end up on the shelf; not so with CMOs. But what about those emerging companies themselves? "If there are two guys thinking about doing a startup, they should do it,” we’re told.
Grigory Potemkin was governor of war-ravaged New Russia in 1787. He’s said to have deployed a shiny “mobile village” along the Dnieper River to impress Catherine II (and the world) as she inspected the region from her barge. Were we, too, in the year 2016, deploying polished porticoes to hide a dimmer reality, at our Outsourced Pharma conferences?
“Big CMOs” acquire smaller contract development and manufacturing organizations in the same way as Big Pharma has historically acquired biotechs and smaller drug developers. This allegory resurfaced with Pfizer’s recent asset acquisition of Bind Therapeutics. What better modern-day model for CMOs to emulate? And we’ve just seen the cases of Catalent’s gobbling up Pharmatek, and Piramal lassoing Ash Stevens …
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