Leadership in Biopharma R&D: Driving Innovation and Pipeline Growth

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India has achieved yet another goal in the R&D of biopharma with the inauguration of the National Research Foundation (NRF) in 2023. The 50,000 Cr INR project is a 72-28 percent private-public partnership that aims to bridge the country’s gaps in biopharma industry. There has been a growth in R&D for biopharmaceuticals across Asian countries post covid and where the CROs are constantly trying to come up with newer and advanced formulations with extended research and development that can add value to the industry as a whole. R&D leaders of biopharmaceutical companies are also taking collaboration as one of the ways to drive innovation but these have to be executed with a certain number of measures.

“We have a lot of handpicked collaborations with companies, and we’ve been quite lucky. But collaboration involves a whole spectrum of interactions. A lot of companies, by their nature, have to be competitive. They have to hide their research; they cannot just share all their data”, mentioned Leszek Lisowski, Molecular Biologist, University of Sydney Children’s Medical Research Institute.

Apart from collaboration, there are a few other ways through which R&D leaders are trying to organize the operations in a better way and achieve desired growth in pipeline. Let us now look into some of these ideas.

Nurturing a Collective Vision

Biopharmaceutical organizations have a special place in the ecosystem where the R&D department have the opportunity to be part of advanced and cutting edge projects that can be of help to the society at large. In this regard, it is a proven fact that if there is a collective vision, that gives the employees a sense of purpose which in turn makes them more productive at work. There is also the possibility of losing skilled people if there is absence of a collective vision in terms of R&D.

To give an example, several biopharma companies have made planned announcements on their own North Star in the past few years. For instance, Roche planned to deliver twice the number of medical advances to society at half the cost, GSK opted for achieving top quartile on cycle times, and Pfizer spoke of delivering up to 25 breakthroughs to patients by the year 2025 according to a report by McKinsey & Company.

Creating a Strong R&D Backbone

Identification of a North Star and achieving it through R&D are two different things. Organizations have to tackle challenges on the grounds of agility and responsiveness and simultaneously aim to maintain quality, safety and stability in operations. This is why, it is very important for large R&D organizations to create a backbone that is flexible as well as efficient.

In order to create a lasting change that can be scaled, the back of R&D can never be overlooked. It was seen in case of one of the top US pharmaceutical company which took an asset-led approach for the reduction in the number of cycles but failed to achieve the target. This experiment created new kinds of inconsistencies and increased the operational burden of the organization itself. This is why, it is very important for an organization to understand where the stability lies in its operating model. The establishment of advice seeking culture must be promoted by the organization that create a sense of predictability and also does not compromise on the aspect of agility. Only from the lessons learned from earlier experiments and outcomes, the structure of the backbone must be created. This allows for the creation of a correct decision making framework and enhances the organization in terms of resources, technology and data.

Establishing an Evolution Engine

Creating a backbone is not a onetime thing or organizations. In order to keep the growth steady, the leadership needs to keep on finding innovative ways to better the operating model. Only through this exercise can a R&D wing in an organization unlock new opportunities and increase product portfolio. This process has been named as the formation of an evolution engine that drives innovation and pipeline growth for an organization. 

However, managing a portfolio of operating-model experiments can be as challenging for leaders as managing a pipeline of molecules. The McKinsey & Company report mentioned, “one top five global pharmaceutical company realized that the organic evolutionary process that enabled it to integrate small, isolated changes (such as a new protocol-review process) was not adequate for larger shifts (such as a new portfolio management approach). It decided to set up a center of excellence for innovation—a kind of R&D “learning lab”—to create an infrastructure for managing larger changes and the scale-up of the new R&D system”.

R&D transformation might seem like a gigantic task for biopharmaceutical companies but it is only through the incorporation of technology innovations and creating of stringent process can organizational goals be achieved. With evolving stakeholder requirements, organizations need to change or get left behind in the market.