Andrew Witty, who led GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) since 08, recently announced his retirement in March 2017 . But the 51- year Witty, a marathon runner who has been with the company for the whole of his career, has a vision for the pharmaceutical giant that extends well beyond its mandate. A central tenet is the belief that big pharmas need to be more in tune with the global society needs. And finish line for GSK is to give poor countries faster access to medicines against cancer if they are effective.
The construction out of a system, the company used for its anti-HIV drugs, GSK announced today its intent to sign agreements on drugs in its cancer portfolio with "Medicines Patent Pool, "an organization supported by the United Nations that helps license generic manufacturers and produce products. GSK said it also plans to adopt a more" flexible "approach to deposit and enforce patents other medicines to encourage generic companies to make and provide GSK products now available mainly in developed countries.
Under Witty, GSK has taken several actions that may seem unusual, a pharmaceutical company focused on profit from public property. in an attempt to discourage sales representatives hyping the value of GSK's drugs, the company stopped paying commissions. Similarly, he does not pay physicians to give lectures to colleagues -which often occurred in restaurants-about its novelty products. (GSK in 2012 agreed to pay a fine of $ 3 billion to the US government for illegally promoting prescription drugs, but the company says that the new policies are not related.) A push for more transparency leads to GSK also create a database that includes the results of all clinical trials, regardless of whether the drug worked or failed.
Witty spoke with science Insider on March 30, and with the candor of a CEO who is not afraid of job security. This is a condensed and edited version of that interview
Q:.? Why are you concerned about your future drugs reaching poor countries
A: We try to streamline and simplify our overall approach to intellectual property (IP) in the world and to graduate essentially what we do around IP as economic maturity of the country. We do not believe that you should treat Malawi in the same way that you treat Britain. It should be more personalized in many dimensions.
With Oncology I am eager to move forward from where the world has reached with HIV 20 years ago. [It took nearly a decade before most poor countries could access anti-HIV drugs proven effective in 1996.] We are very excited about what we have in oncology; we have great leadership and epigenetic immuno-oncology. Whether or not they will do so, we must wait and see, but we try to lay the foundations
Q :. The great excitement in the cancer immunotherapy, and these products will potentially be very expensive. Are you including those
A: They would be included. Not only are they likely to be expensive, but they will require fairly sophisticated technology and medical systems around them. I'm not saying this will solve everything. He will not be. Some of these things are just out of reach in some of these countries. But we would like to say that if there are opportunities for our drugs to be accelerated in terms of access in the developing world, and if the systems are capable of using them, so we want to ensure that this is done.
Q: Pharmaceutical companies exist to make money. It is clear that companies want to be seen in a good light, but you have shareholders. How do you separate make a profit and do good
A: You start by trying to do good and do the right thing first, and try to profit maximize second. We've all seen examples of many companies in many sectors that have done the other way. They look great for a few years and then something terrible happens. Somehow, the newspapers tend to catch the business section.
In recent years, we have increasingly been willing to challenge and change our basic business model. Rather than saying we're going to compete in the marketplace like everyone else, we'll instead ask how we can fundamentally change the way we operate. Each of the things we've done has led to a sudden inspiration by others, but over time people have followed us. And if you look at the fourth quarter of last year, 16.5% of our pharmaceutical sales came from new products, which is the highest for a big pharma. That said, you can indeed innovate your business model to do something that I think is more in tune with society and at the same time do very, very well for shareholders
Q: . Is expanding your markets developing countries paid financially
A: Certainly, we expanded our position dramatically in emerging markets. We absolutely an average selling price lower than our competitors, but we have a significantly higher volume. About a third of all GSK worldwide, we manufacture and sell in India
Q :. But there is a gap between the desire to do good and do good. GSK has its HIV dolutegravir drug, which has become extremely popular in rich countries, a patent pool in April 2014 , but it is still not widely available in developing countries.
has: In America, Europe, and Japan, dolutegravir very well one of the main drugs of choice, but has just started happening on a very expedited basis during the last year or two. Always time for setting up a treatment protocol to flow through the overall market and in the development of global programs. And inevitably, particularly with countries that must husband their resources very carefully, they rightly take some time before adopting new drugs.
We expect a voluntary license shall be issued to a generic manufacturer to dolutegravir in the next 18 months. Hopefully this coincides with the increasing uptake of the drug
Q :. You talk about how the company wants to position itself to improve the way it is perceived by society. We are emerging from a time when the pharmaceutical industry has been vilified. Are these new initiatives
A:. Every industry has had its share of challenges and criticism
Do not underestimate our long-term commitment. It is useless to have a business model or a state of mind which was in the 1980s You have to have a mindset that matches the 2020s, the 2030s and 2040s it n 'there is no value in innovation that does not reach those in need.
She was not either / or choice. Could we were slightly more short-term success? May be. But would we have had more long-term success? I do not think we could.
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