Novartis, Microsoft Senior Leaders: Digital Transformation Is Biopharma’s Business

The marriage between pharmaceutical and IT has been fully consummated in the context of alliances. Long having been used to partnering with smaller biotechs, biopharma and healthcare companies now collectively count multitudes of traditional tech startups in their partner portfolios. Collaborations with pure IT companies aim to take advantage of cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and other data analytics technologies to find new drug candidates quicker, get better care to patients, and streamline core operations.

In addition, Big Pharma and Big Tech are doing their own dance now. Whether it’s Google partnering with Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi or Microsoft and Novartis launching a major data-focused initiative, the DJ has many tunes queued up for Global 1,000 corporations in these two spaces, and more and more of them are getting out on the floor together.

Your Biopharma Employer Will Be a Tech Company: Why That Matters to You  

Many in tech have been saying that “every company is becoming a tech company” for so long that it has practically become an aphorism in the industry. But what does that mean for biopharma, and in particular for biopharma alliance professionals? Senior executives from the aforementioned Novartis-Microsoft alliance are currently scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 2022 ASAP BioPharma Conference that will reveal the answer by answering another question: “What Do Biopharma Alliance Managers Need to Know About Digital Transformation?”

Concepts and broad technologies that are foundational in the technology space are now very relevant in biopharma.

“We have been hearing our tech colleagues talk about ‘digital transformation’ and the ‘journey to cloud’ at recent ASAP Summits over the past few years,” noted Brooke Paige, CSAP, digital alliance leader at Novartis Pharmaceuticals and former ASAP board chair, who is actively engaged on the front lines of the Novartis-Microsoft collaboration. “Our speakers plan to demystify these concepts and put them in a biopharma context.”

In This Case, Tomorrow Does Know: Digital Transformation Is a Biopharma Issue

Although digital health partnerships might have recently been—and may still be—considered a separate warded-off segment of the average pharmaceutical company’s alliance portfolio, digital transformation, the concept that technology will underpin a makeover of each company’s fundamental business and operational models, by definition will eventually have ramifications that will permeate traditional pharmaceutical collaborations involving other drug makers, biotechs, academia, contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs), and contract research organizations (CROs).

In other words, if you don’t think tech alliances are your business now, they will be sooner than you think.

“If we are not managing digital alliances today, we almost certainly will be tomorrow,” said Paige. “All biopharma alliance managers will benefit from hearing the speakers’ impressions of what it takes to really excel at managing digital collaborations, especially those with large-enterprise partners.”

The Hookup: BioPharma Conference Delivers Tech Knowledge and Networking

In addition to defining tech terms that dominate the general business discourse and explaining why biopharma managers should care about them, this keynote will cover some basics on what tech companies value most and how to make collaborations with these IT outfits successful for the long haul.

“What Do Biopharma Alliance Managers Need to Know About Digital Transformation?” delivers on the ASAP BioPharma Conference’s core mission to bring the latest insights alliance managers need to advance their careers. However, the conference isn’t just about knowledge, it’s about networking with the profession’s best and brightest, too.

“What a great opportunity to ask senior leaders what alliance managers need to know about our tech partners’ worlds, how we can quickly get up to speed, and how we can add value,” said Paige. 

Registration for the conference is still open but filling up fast. Sign up now and join us in Boston Sept. 28–30!