Biopharma 2018: Is There Still A Place For Pharma In The New Health Care Economy?

The key challenge confronting biopharma in 2018 is the disconnect between an abundance of transformative science and a hidebound commercial and regulatory model that continues to place barriers to making the right medicines accessible to patients who need them. It’s a structural problem in the delivery and financing of health care overall, but one that impacts biopharma disproportionately by adding to the cost of drug development, denting the benefits of innovation and diminishing the industry’s reputation as a force for social good.

Solving for the imperfections that guide institutional behavior – can human health provision ever be anything but “messy”? – will dominate the commercial and policy agenda for biopharma in 2018. In Vivo Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) member and health care portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management Les Funtleyder describes current attitudes in the C-suite as one of “disembodied anxiety” fueled by a host of factors, including pricing pressures; restive patients; the ascent of adjacent players like Amazon; state government transparency mandates; the soaring cost of deferred IT investments; compliance and anti-trust exposures; and those generic and specialty segment train wrecks