We are witnessing pharma renaissance, says industry expert

Speaking at Fortune Most Powerful Women, London, Sandra Peterson, group worldwide chairman of Johnson & Johnson said:  “One of the great exciting things that is happening is the understanding of biology and genomics and all the other omics, which are many of them, is really changing the way we understand how diseases develop, the progressions of disease, the disease pathways.

“Ten years ago, when people talked about, we’re going to sequence the genome and we’re going to have personalised medicine, I think most people had a perspective of what that was going to mean for what the pharmaceutical industry does and how it works. And the reality is what we’re seeing now is quite different than what we thought but it’s even much more exciting, which is that we now understand how diseases can develop and migrate in pathways through your body in a way – using deep data.

“And this is where big data and analytics is important because you need a lot of data to figure out what’s really going on here. But it helps us have a much better understanding of how these diseases develop, how they transmit, what kind of treatments and what kind of drug development you need to have to make this become a reality. And we’re seeing a renaissance in the pharmaceutical industry as a result of this.

“The medicines are much more specialised. They’re addressing diseases that people thought were not curable in lots of different ways and the old methods of finding ways to cure them were not working. So it’s a very exciting time, but what it requires is a very different view of how you manage R&D.”