From Breakthrough Science to Patient Impact
Europe has world-class science—but too few ideas reach patients. Patrick van der Loo, Country President Pfizer Germany, explains what innovators need to scale and compete.
What does pharma need from innovators?
What you need now are people that don't just have the right ideas coming out of basic research. These innovators also need to show that they can work at speed and at scale with partners in big pharma.
Then when you think about artificial intelligence and how that needs to help, it needs to facilitate working at speed and scale.
Pfizer, as an example, we're not an AI company. We're a company that delivers therapies for patients across the globe. AI can help with that, and AI also needs to help these innovators get to that point.
How can Europe scale innovation?
Germany, and Europe in general, has great basic research capabilities, but it often fails to get access to the right capital to get these ideas into proper research and development projects.
Those research and development projects then need to be translated into clinical research, manufacturing and ultimately final products.
A lot can still be improved in the conditions surrounding this life-cycle ecosystem.
And that's where I think a lot can still be improved in Europe in general, but in Germany in particular.
Why does bio:cap matter?
I think when you think about bio:cap and why we're so happy that bio:cap is happening now and the reason why we were involved very early on in the discussions with Messe Berlin and Charité to be a part of this is exactly that.
When I came to Germany, I saw very clearly that there is phenomenal basic research. But I'm surprised that a company like Pfizer, which has a history of collaborating with companies across the globe and in Germany, currently doesn't have any research projects with German innovations.
So for me, it's very important that we show what is happening in the Berlin-Brandenburg region and across Europe and how that can be linked to partners that can help drive these innovations into something tangible for patients.
But in order to do that, you need capital and the conditions that make this possible. I think having innovators here, having access to capital here and having access to big pharma here is great.
What you also want is policymakers at the table to help move this forward. And I think bio:cap is really important to facilitate that.
bio:cap really needs to work on what its USP is among investment conferences across the globe. I think the link between innovation, capital and framework conditions can be exactly that USP.
How can Europe stay competitive?
So one thing that Europe can really do to be more competitive in the long run is that it needs to start acting like one market. Right now there are too many conditions that are still market dependent. And so you don't have this huge hundreds of millions of people market, but you have 27 fragmented markets.
If Europe can get its act together and really function as one market, I think with all the basic research that we have in Europe, there's a phenomenal future for Europe in the life science sector.
