Amgen leaders Gilles Marrache and Greg Friberg took to the stage at the Financial Times global pharmaceutical and biotechnology conference in November, when CEOs, policymakers and thought leaders came together to discuss the future of the industry.
Echoing the overall conference theme of “Sustaining innovation and collaboration beyond the pandemic,” Gilles Marrache (regional general manager for Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Africa and Canada) and Greg Friberg (vice president of Medical Affairs, Europe, Latin-America, Middle East, Africa, Canada) spoke to over 2000 industry professionals on the topics of “Making Pharma more Patient Centric” and the “Power of Partnerships” at this annual event.
Making pharma more patient centric
“The drive for meaningful change for patients challenges us all to work to reorient our healthcare system away from a reactive ‘fixing what’s broken’ model towards a proactive and innovative public health approach aiming to predict and help prevent life-altering events from occurring in the first place,” Marrache told delegates.
Asked how we might achieve this, Marrache commented, “we cannot do this alone. Amgen is partnering with multiple patient-centred organizations around the world, as well as a range of other private and public partners to serve patients.”
Acknowledging the importance of empowering patients, Marrache outlined how Amgen is re-imagining new approaches to support patients “where they are” and constantly looking at innovative ways to engage with patients. “Our ambition is to improve outcomes for patients, identifying and aiming to remove potential roadblocks in the patient journey,” he told the audience.
As an example of reaching patients “where they are,” Marrache described an initiative to offer holistic healthy ageing solutions to help women aged over 65 who live with osteoporosis and hearing loss, connecting with women when they have their regular hearing check-ups. The ambition of this new pilot collaboration with Sonova Group’s Audiological Care business is to increase the diagnosis rate of people at dual risk of fragility fractures and hearing loss in Europe by 30% by 2024, Marrache told the audience. “This means that an additional 160,000 fractures due to osteoporosis could be prevented.”
The power of partnerships
Building on the need for change, Friberg told the audience that COVID has exacerbated the challenges that the healthcare system was already facing, such as increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, health disparities and constrained budgets.
“It’s important that we collaborate to highlight the disruption of care as an unintended consequence of COVID-19 and help ensure that patients from underserved communities and patients with chronic disease are not forgotten,” he noted. “Collectively, we can make a significant difference.”
“At Amgen, we are partnering to drive innovation beyond the molecule and transform care delivery to serve patients. Advances in precise detection and diagnosis will greatly minimize the cost of treating chronic conditions. Harnessing more sophisticated use of remote tools like telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and new knowledge of genome sequencing and molecular diagnostics is offering a better understanding of the precise nature of diseases and ways to develop personalized medicine for treatment and improve outcomes for patients.”
Friberg reiterated the importance of moving from the traditional “one size fits all” approach to more efficient, targeted or personalized treatments. He shared a proof point of how Amgen collaborates with multiple stakeholders in a current initiative bringing together 19 key hospitals, local societies and local governments in the EU to transform cardiovascular outcomes post Myocardial Infarction (MI) care. “We are focusing on patients with high risk of a secondary events via better post MI care pathways and benchmarking of outcomes to drive adherence to guideline therapy and improve patient outcomes,” he advised.
Marrache and Friberg concluded by telling conference delegates that Amgen is committed to acting as a catalyst for change.
Read more about related programs:
- Amgen and Sonova® Collaboration: Closing the Diagnosis Gap for Osteoporosis and Hearing Loss
- 4 Ways Amgen Is Working with Organizations to Improve Osteoporosis Care and Bone Health
- CDC Foundation Announces New Program Supported by Amgen to Improve Cancer Outcomes Through Empowerment
- Alliance for the Million Hearts Campaign Aims to Prevent One Million Heart Attacks and Strokes by 2022
- Working Together to Improve Public Health Outcomes
