On October 26th, Trexin attended the Executive’s Club of Chicago event “Pharma Innovation: Beyond Blockbuster Drugs”.   The panel was moderated by John Flavin, AVP of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and featured:

• Jim Robinson, President, Astellas Americas
• Ramona Sequeira, President US, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
• Tim Walbert, Chairman, President and CEO, Horizon Pharma

The discussion primarily focused on the concepts of barriers versus successes, along with innovation and what innovation means in pharma. Two of the biggest barriers referenced in the conversation were history (attempting to do things as they’ve previously been done) and working with unsophisticated advocacy groups. One notable success included leveraging data and analytics as a means to predict what’s next from disease and treatment evolution. This aids in getting ahead of the game when developing solutions which sometimes take decades to test and obtain approval on. Another successful angle is big pharma partnering with driven and energetic start-up firms. It was stated that the pace, teamwork and results are clear differentiators in these types of partnerships.

Respective to innovation, it was clear that innovation is required in every step in advancing medicine from scratch. The Trexin team was inspired by the panelists’ (and their respective organizations’) focus on total health and wellness of patients and their families in the process of  delivering new and innovative solutions to previously incurable diseases. With the desire to advance treatment of both common/chronic diseases and rare/complicated diseases, along with use of innovative technology and partnerships, we’ve only just begun to see how pharma will evolve in these exciting times.