Europe At the recent FT webinar, ‘Supporting Pharma Innovation in Europe’, high-level representatives from Roche, Bayer, and the European Commission weighed in on how European pharma’s competitive position on innovation is being challenged and the policy measures that need to be enacted to solve this issue. Read on for five key…

Spain As Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, became the latest leader to call for COVID-19 to be treated as an endemic illness like the flu, regional health authorities warn that it might be too soon, going as far as calling it a “serious mistake,” an opinion echoed by the World Health…

Spain While Spain’s scientific infrastructure has long been hailed as world-class, the southern European nation has often struggled to translate its excellent science into viable commercial companies. However, a growing cadre of clinical-stage firms are aiming to change that narrative and become the biotech success story that Spain so desperately craves.…

Global Taking the massive Microsoft acquisition of videogame company Activision Blizzard as his jumping-off point, Shawview Consulting’s Brendan Shaw lays out six key life science industry trends to watch in the coming year and wonders whether 2022 will be pharma’s ‘Call of Duty’ moment.   A few weeks ago, 2022 started…

APAC Drawing on the findings of a recent report launched under the Business Ethics for APEC SMEs Initiative, Thomas Cueni of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) outlines the benefits for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of adopting ethical practices. Cueni highlights some of the key trends that emerged from report, conducted…

Global Bernie Zeiher, chief medical officer (CMO) of Astellas explains why the ‘patient-defined value’ of medicines is crucial to developing therapies that truly address patients’ unmet medical needs. Zeiher outlines some of Astellas’ work with patient advocacy groups to generate these insights, why a new era of real-world data (RWD) generation…

Global Over two years since the first cases of COVID-19, the world is still coming to terms with the virus. While vaccines have been developed and rolled out in record time in high-income countries, the developing world risks falling behind. Less than ten percent of the African continent has been vaccinated,…

Saudi Arabia Saudi Chemical Company Holding (SCCH), Saudi Arabia’s leading manufacturer of civil and military explosives, has been expanding its pharma sector footprint in recent years. Today, the company has capabilities across pharma distribution through SITCO Pharma, manufacturing (both for its own products and as a contract manufacturing organisation (CMO)) via AJA…

Global As complex cutting-edge therapies come online, industry sponsors are increasingly looking to engage with patients, caregivers, and advocacy groups earlier and more broadly in the drug development process to better understand their needs. However, as the below insights from four of Novartis Oncology’s patient engagement leads show, successfully integrating patient…

MEA Seasoned executive Mohamed Nasser currently oversees 16 markets for Amgen across the MEA region, including its most important – Saudi Arabia. He shares some of the key skills that pharma executives overseeing his region need to succeed.   As region head for a company that is only 40 years old,…

Global One of the enduring conundrums around ground-breaking and potentially paradigm-shifting treatments such as CAR-T is the ever-thorny question of how fast to move them to market when the promise seems so great, but the evidence remains so patchy.   So far, top tier regulators such as the US FDA and…

Saudi Arabia While Saudi Arabia is becoming an increasingly attractive investment destination for global pharma, some stakeholders continue to have concerns about whether the country’s intellectual property (IP) protection system is truly fit for purpose.   Oscar Delgado of BMS is one such stakeholder. “An adequate IP system, including regulatory data protection…