Unique Advantages in Public-Private-Partnerships for Biopharma
Jean-Christophe Tellier, vice-president and president-elect of the board of European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, said China has unique advantages in adopting the public-private-partnership or PPP model focusing on patient-centered discovery and development to lead biopharmaceutical innovation in its next wave.
China has world-class scientists with an entrepreneurial spirit, many of whom returned to China from overseas armed with years' experience working at top global pharmaceutical, academic and research institutions, according to Tellier.
China also has advanced data technology represented by artificial intelligence giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, leading a global wave in the age of internet of things, he said.
Healthy China 2030 is also enacting grand policies to advance biopharmaceutical innovation, followed by the implementations of local governments giving incentives to attract innovative business, he added.
Tellier made the remarks during a keynote speech on "fostering public-private partnerships for biopharmaceutical innovation in China, benefiting patients worldwide" at the recently closed Second International Pharmaceutical Innovation Forum held in Beijing.
In an interview after his keynote speech, Tellier, who is also CEO of UCB, a global biopharmaceutical company focusing on the discovery and development of innovative medicines and solutions for severe diseases in immunology and neurology, said the speed of advancement in sciences and technology demands a joint force from partners of different backgrounds. In doing so, they can accelerate breakthroughs in innovation in China's pharmaceutical industry, and PPPs are very helpful in accelerated learning and scientific progress in all areas including healthcare.
"Public-private partnership is a fantastic platform to build radical multi-stakeholder collaboration, for players that normally will not connect to really work together," he said.
Also, PPP "creates an economy of scale to address a challenge that otherwise we would never tackle", which, through a lot of different partners that really work together and dedicate a significant amount of time and resources, accelerates the innovation and opens doors to new pathways and new opportunities for the future vision in pharmaceutical innovation, said Tellier.
He believes global pharmaceutical companies like UCB have a perfect role to play in contributing to China's PPP-based pharmaceutical innovation.
In his opinion, China is a leading economy that is dedicating increasingly more resources to provide better healthcare to its people, and PPP can be used to develop the affordability of such healthcare services, through building a value-based healthcare system that is not just about budgets for spending (on medicine) but also tries to better understand how medicine creates value for society by helping it to become healthier.
Many different players, such as technology companies, AI and academics, will be interested in building such a value-based healthcare system that better understands what patients need through technological assessment, Tellier said.
He used the EIT - European Institute of Innovation and Technology - as an example of cross-sector collaboration in which up to 40 partners from the private, public and academic sectors work together to bring out pharmaceutical innovation, saying that the consistency in the decision of community is needed between what had been decided as a priority and the commitments of the different partners, to then dedicate resources to work on a PPP project.
He also referred to Europe's Innovative Medicines Initiative, or IMI, as an example, which is the biggest PPP project in life sciences and health in the world with a budget of 5.3 billion euros for the period of 2008 to 2020.
IMI facilitates collaboration among an array of extremely broad players involved in the healthcare ecosystem, and the IMI partners include universities, research centers, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, imaging and data analysis, nongovernment organizations, small and medium-sized enterprises, payers, patient organizations, and medicines regulators in Europe, he said.
Global pharmaceutical companies' life science PPP expertise, and their strength in scientific discovery and its translation to innovative medical solutions for patients, position them to be the best partner to co-create a Chinese multi-stakeholder collaboration platform, together with the Chinese government, local pharmaceuticals, Chinese patients, AI companies, academic institutions, hospitals, SMEs, and other like-minded organizations, according to Tellier.
However, there are challenges of working via PPP, especially when people underestimate the difficulties in bringing different "brains" together to work on a common project.
Bringing people from all the different industries, and partnering scientific academics and public people on the same project will be interesting, but not easy, he said.
Another challenge will be to decide the priorities while working on a PPP project, as sometimes the priorities of private companies are not the same as those of the public or academics, he added.
Tellier is also chairman of IMI's governing board, and a member of the board of the Walloon Institute for Life Lead Sciences and that of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
(China Daily 04/09/2019 page11)
