At the beginning of the summer, I had the opportunity to join the team at Royalty Pharma for a great event at MIT (link here). It was an interesting time for me as I was thinking about the new role I was about to take at Bristol Myers Squibb. While I had certainly been “a leader” for several years now, I was pushing myself to think through and question my perspectives on R&D now that I was taking on increasing responsibilities as “the leader” of the research organization.
And so the presentation opportunity with Royalty really pushed me to articulate my views in a way that would hopefully resonate with and inspire others. I titled my presentation “Bullseye.Aim.Fire” and then renamed it “Increasing R&D Productivity to Deliver Transformational Medicines” so the topic would be more obvious. What I’m really sharing in the presentation is my fundamental belief about R&D, linking together several factors that I see as mission critical.
To me, it really all comes down to causal human biology. In order to be successful, we must understand the cause-and-effect relationship between perturbing a particular biological target with a medicine and the outcome that will then impact human physiology.…