#DDPEvent 2012: Steven Burill & the outlook on Pharma and Emerging Countries

KEYNOTE: The Globalization of the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry: What Does it Mean for Your Bottom Line?
G. Steven Burrill, Burrill & Company

Pharma will no longer be an industry driven by multibillion dollar drugs, instead, it will be focused on personalized medicine. Big and small companies are focusing, one section of this will be in stem cells. The Pharma companies want new return opportunities.

What is the good news coming for the Pharma industry? Pharma will continue to succeed in the world of personalized medicine. Defining desease differently is a big part of the success of the personalized medicine. Burrill places emphasis on the fact that the FDA has approved more drugs this year than over the past few years. The healthcare needs of a place like China are huge, as they have 300 billion in their population and essentially an entire United States of the older generation.

Pharma will loose most of their revenue with patent expirations, this leads to massive generic competition. Over 70% of prescriptions written today are generic drugs. Drug development costs continue to increase. Used to be 7 years for $200 million to get a drug to market, it could be 15 years and cost over $1.6 billion. Big Pharma is getting out of the R&D Businesss, from 2009-201, Pfizer dropped their R&D Budget 9.2%.

What does Pharma do best? They are an industry that excels at sales and distribution. Personalized medicine a pro-health industry being lead by digital. The iPhone is leading the industry, changing the care for diabetes and hard disease among other things. It’s turning into a functional wellness care system.

Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America are very different emerging markets. Many companies have partnered in order to reach deeper into the market – most frequently in biologics and biosimilars.

The world around us is flat, single, interconnected borderless marketplace. Most places around the world are trying to protect local industry, while the United States is doing the exact opposite. Everything healthare has done to take care of all of the acute problems has been done, so not as many people die as in the beginning.

Featured Panel Discussion: Emerging Markets: What are the Current Market Opportunities and How Do We Make them Profitable?
Moderator: Ronald L. Smith, Merck
Panelists:
G. Steven Burrill, Burrill & Company
Christopher Seaton, Bayer Pharmaceuticals
Uros Urleb, Sandoz

Burrill: One of the ways we will succeed in emerging markets is through innovation. Innovativeness is the competitive advantage of the United States, we will have to continue to be that way in terms of new product development and delivery so we can provide value to emerging markets.

Seaton doesn’t agree: We don’t know what will happen in the next 5-6 years. The US Market over the next 3-5 years, it’s flat, but that is driven by the loss of exclusivity. As a Pharma industry, we’ve been terrible about thinking outside a box. He sees little innovation in big Pharma. Burrill believes that in most countries, they are different because they don’t have as much consumer driven advertising. Urleb believes it’s the time for generics.

Packaging in Pharma is very important. Marketing is one part, but so is technical. Seaton then wonders what the packaging will do: help differentiate his product is safety, efficacy or cost. Without a holistic approach, the companies can’t predict the packaging. Would this be a partnership opportunity or what? Burrill believes we think of healthcare in a dysfunctional sick care system, but when we actually know what’s wrong with them, we can treat them that way.

Technology today will change the way the industry works. Pharma by and large today is actually disconnected with the customer. Seaton: we don’t have nearly enough data about our products about the people who actually take Pharma’s products. If Pharma can get access to data like this, like genome sequencing works against medicine, the insights would be huge.