Recently, AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant, reached a research and development cooperation with two pharmaceutical companies, Benevolentai and Scorpion Therapeutics, within one day.
According to the agreement, AstraZeneca will use their AI drug development platforms to accelerate the development of new drugs for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and heart failure (HF), and develop innovative anti-cancer therapies for transcription factors that are difficult to become medicines.
As early as 219, AstraZeneca reached an R&D agreement with BenevolentAI to jointly develop innovative therapies for chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The latest agreement further expands the cooperation between the two parties and adds the above two diseases to the R&D cooperation.
In cooperation with Scorpion Therapeutics, AstraZeneca hopes to combine its integrated discovery platform with its own expertise in the development of cancer precision medicine to overcome the challenge of targeted transcription factors.
in recent years, AstraZeneca has been very active in digital medical distribution.
in 221, AstraZeneca set up its China East Headquarters in Hangzhou, focusing on the research and development of new drugs, medical devices and medical data with the help of new retail of e-commerce, mobile medical care and Internet industry, and introducing a new retail model of innovative pharmacies.
From the above actions, AstraZeneca is increasingly unsatisfied with the traditional staffing of a pharmaceutical company. Why has it become an "alternative" in the pharmaceutical industry?
Benevolent AI and Scorpion Therapeutics both belong to AI drug discovery company.
among them, Benevolent AI was founded in 213 and its headquarters is in London, England. According to the amount of financing, BenevolentAI has become the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in Europe, ranking the top five in the world.
At present, the company has built a proprietary AI drug discovery platform, which combines the scientific expertise of about 3 world-class scientists and technicians with complete wet laboratory capabilities, and can deliver new drug candidates with high probability.
Only its existing pipeline may serve patients with over 26 million people, with a market opportunity of over 3 billion yuan.
the business segment of the company is divided into Benevolent Bio and Benevolent Tech.
what AstraZeneca values is Benevolent's comprehensive ability in knowledge map, Al drug discovery platform and wet laboratory facilities.
Another company, Scorpion Therapeutics, was founded in 22 and headquartered in Boston, USA, focusing on the research and development of drugs for the next generation of precision treatment of cancer tumors.
The company combines genomics, protein omics, medicinal chemistry and new target identification into one platform. At present, the company has launched a research and development plan for precise tumor 2. drugs.
this time, the cooperation with AstraZeneca is based on its 2. plan, hoping to develop therapeutic candidate drugs for "untreatable" non-enzymatic targets and internally discovered protein targets, so as to achieve best-in-class and first-in-class in drug research and development in the same field.
generally speaking, one of the two companies is experienced in the AI pharmaceutical industry and has a mature R&D pipeline; One company has a precise positioning in the field of cancer diseases, and its competitive potential is sufficient. AstraZeneca takes a fancy to these two companies, that is, it chooses to "deepen and refine" drug research and development.
New drug research and development is a multi-link, long-term and high-risk project, which mainly includes four stages: drug discovery, preclinical research, clinical research, approval and listing.
However, from the point of view of human diseases, there are more than 2, genes encoding proteins, of which 1%-15% are related to diseases, and less than 7 can be used as targets of small molecular drugs. The easy targets have been developed, and the rest are very difficult or difficult to become drugs, which requires more time and economic costs to succeed.
the acceleration of this process has opened a breakthrough point for the problems of long drug research and development cycle, low success rate and high cost of traditional pharmaceutical companies.
AstraZeneca was founded in 1999 and merged by two pharmaceutical companies.
in the development of more than 2 years, it has different "ways of survival" in different times, from self-developed new drugs to agent sales, from * * * research new drugs to medical services, from innovation incubation to capital cooperation.
AstraZeneca's development process can be divided into the following stages:
AstraZeneca, at the beginning of its establishment, formed a competitive advantage with three patented products for chronic diseases, and covered the front-end R&D costs with the scale of the terminal market, and its development was smooth all the way in the 2th century.
however, in the first decade of the 21st century, AstraZeneca continued to "eat" patents, and the research and development cost of new drugs remained high, and the research and development efficiency was far less than that of innovative small companies, so it began to transfer research and development centers to third world countries while maintaining the global price system.
This backward-looking situation has led to a serious "green-yellow gap" in AstraZeneca's internal product line.
Subsequently, after 21, AstraZeneca's patent "sat on the mountain" and gradually lost its patent protection. Generally speaking, under the protection of the patent system, innovative drug manufacturers can not only resist the imitation of other pharmaceutical companies, but also have time to develop new innovative drugs and cultivate emerging markets.
However, AstraZeneca, which has not gone out of the patent trough, can only refuse Pfizer's takeover invitation, while greatly increasing R&D investment, M&A frequency and fire sale.
According to incomplete statistics, in 215 alone, AstraZeneca made 14 acquisitions, four of which exceeded $2 billion.
in 216, AstraZeneca concentrated on sale again, with 11 cases involving small molecule infection departments and anesthesia departments.
A series of slimming actions have laid the groundwork for AstraZeneca's follow-up route.
215 is an important year in AstraZeneca's development.
during this year, the company put forward new business innovation ideas and market strategies, and announced that it would gradually shift from a traditional foreign pharmaceutical enterprise to a platform-based enterprise of innovative medicine.
during this period, AstraZeneca accelerated its "cross-border" cooperation with partners in the fields of pharmacy, equipment, diagnosis, digitalization and capital, and penetrated into the capillaries of the grassroots market.
in 219, China market became AstraZeneca's second largest market for the first time, accounting for one-fifth of the total revenue. AstraZeneca even beat Pfizer and took the first place in China market.
in 22, AstraZeneca ranked first in the China market, with annual revenue of $5.375 billion, while Merck, which ranked second, and Roche, which ranked third, both earned $3.5 billion, far behind AstraZeneca.
At this time, AstraZeneca was relieved by the "stable output" in China. Until the epidemic came, AstraZeneca was pushed again.
the combination of digital technology and various industries has played a decisive role in the epidemic, especially in the medical and health industries. The operation of offline hospitals is hindered by the epidemic, but the medical needs of the people are increasing, and Internet medical care has ushered in the strongest growth in history.
In 221, Chloe Wang said in an interview, "AstraZeneca's main business is still selling medicine, but why do you have to remember others taking medicine?"
In AstraZeneca's vision, pharmaceutical companies are no longer just drug sales, but "innovative platform companies that provide integrated services for patients".
If a pharmaceutical company concentrates all its energy and resources on late-stage treatment based on its own product line, instead of early warning, disease diagnosis and post-treatment management, it will undoubtedly increase the burden on patients and medical insurance.
But if you change your business model from selling drugs to selling services, you are willing to make some efforts in digital marketing, which will not only help you find potential users, increase sales, cover the long tail of the original drug sales, but also convey other upstream and downstream new products to users.
in essence, this is also an inevitable move to cater to the changes in consumer psychology and methods in the digital economy era.
In the long run, the effect of digitalization will definitely appear. The more target people and times are affected, the better the effect will be, and the marginal cost will decrease.
So, besides selling drugs, there are a lot of work to be done in other links. For example, relying on the Internet of Things technology, a healthy Internet of Things network connecting different regions and different levels of medical institutions is gradually built to realize the whole course management of patients from prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment to rehabilitation.
another example is to seek the support of various local partners.
One of the most important points is that China's vast market, China's local medical habits and China's digital environment have laid the foundation for AstraZeneca to create a "China model", which has been copied all over the world.
in 22, AstraZeneca issued the "Wulin Call Order" for AI medical treatment, seeking cooperation with top artificial intelligence companies at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
at the beginning of 221, AstraZeneca frequently promoted business cooperation, and announced that it had transformed into a platform-based company, with many layouts in digitalization and innovation ecology.
from the perspective of foreign cooperation, AstraZeneca plans to launch 2 products to support the goal of $15 billion in revenue, including self-research, joint development, agency and investment.
It includes cooperation with dozens of pharmaceutical companies such as Kunyao Group (Medical Big Health), Zero Krypton Technology (Medical Big Data), Junshi Bio (a star company listed in Hong Kong stock market), Omron (instrument company), and Chenyi Family (digital medical solution provider);
Introduce enterprises such as Dr. Zeqiao (medical informatization), Neptune Star (chain pharmacy), Shenzhi Technology (ultrasonic AI) and Dizhe Medicine hatched by themselves to their own life science innovation park;
and establish partnerships with CICC Capital, Gaoyao Venture Capital, Tiger Medicine, Yunfeng Fund and Honghui Capital.
from the perspective of internal structure adjustment, AstraZeneca established a brand-new business department-omni-channel business department in China in early 222, covering the county chronic disease business department, retail business department, community business department, feiying business department and the eastern five county markets.
In addITion, in terms of personnel transfer, AstraZeneca has set up a new post at the level of vice president to take charge of digitalization, and it integrates AstraZeneca's IT team, Smart Health Innovation Center, International Life Science Innovation Park and digital business, pointing to the layout of channels and digitalization.
in short, what AstraZeneca wants to do is a BAT in the pharmaceutical industry.
As Chloe Wang, president of China District, said, "If you feel that this is not related to your core therapeutic field, please let others do it as much as possible. Don't touch it, let others touch it, and you will be a meeting host. You don't have to think about the content, just participate. Or the automobile assembly plant, we can do the final assembly work. "
At present, with the blessing of various procurement policies and digital technology, a large number of pharmaceutical companies are following the trend of the times and thinking about new ideas for enterprise transformation.
Among them, there is a big health transformation field like Kunyao Group, which expands the consumer groups and scale;
Some companies like Hengrui Pharma are developing generic drugs while supporting the research and development of innovative drugs with greater cash flow;
There are also small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies like Yahong Pharmaceutical, which have scaled down the scale of drug development and made their own way in the generic drug market.
But more of them are pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca that have turned into platform companies, as have Novartis, Takeda and Pfizer.
After Wan Sihan, CEO of Novartis, took office, Novartis began to transform into a medical and health company driven by data science and digital technology in 218, and reached cooperation with Tencent Smart Medicine and Ark Jianke to explore more possibilities of innovative management mode throughout the course.
takeda, the largest pharmaceutical company in Asia, did not adopt the mode of digital innovation in the whole process of giant pharmaceutical companies, but added digital modules to the existing core product lines to solve the urgent needs with digitalization.
For example, after the acquisition of Shire in 217, Takeda immediately completed the global reorganization, focusing its business resources on core businesses such as cancer, digestive organs and central nervous system, and built three projects around these core drugs, namely "Gastrointestinal Disease Data", "Services for Patients with Mental Illness", "AI Plus New Drug Discovery and Incubator".
Pfizer, because of the implementation of China's volume purchasing policy, the performance of its core products was mediocre, so it began to increase the layout of new sales channels in 22, and announced the establishment of a separate market expansion team in early 221 to develop new digital platforms, e-commerce channels, Internet hospitals, government partnerships and many other new initiatives to support all business departments.
in a word, all these enterprises are carrying out digital layout.
On the one hand, they see the future trend: digital knowledge and information become the new key production factors, and platformization is to reshape the new production relations in the innovative economy.
On the other hand, the external environment has forced the digital transformation of pharmaceutical companies to be put on the agenda due to the COVID-19 epidemic and the new medical reform.
from AI pharmaceutical to r&d cooperation, from traditional pharmaceutical companies to platform giants, the digital transformation of pharmaceutical companies implies more propositions of the times, reflecting the changing needs of the industry and enterprises themselves.
the development of pharmaceutical companies should keep up with the general trend of the times, the combination of "AI+ digitalization" or an inevitable trend of pharmaceutical companies in the future.
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