Interview
Managing Partner at Monacon Beteiligungs GmbH
Michael Müller founded Cepton Strategies, a company that in 2014 sold the Boston's firm CRA. German financial newspaper Capital has called his company the leading strategic consultancy in healthcare, ahead of McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Roland Berger. Müller has led numerous projects involving private equity companies, healthcare groups and investment funds and is an expert in corporate strategy with extensive experience in business development, R&D and M&A.
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One of the main conclusions of the Forum of the BioRegion was the undeniable impact technology has on our relationship with healthcare. The biopharma, medtech and digital health sectors have a great deal to say in this regard, as they are the key sectors we must face. Michael Müller, a speaker at the Forum of the BioRegion and one of the keynote speakers on the current state of digital health, shares with us his inspiring point of view on the main trends and challenges in biopharma. Spoiler alert: the time for change has come.
While in the past the pharmaceutical industry has undertaken most of the value-adding steps internally, today, most of those steps along the value chain are either outsourced or done by partnering with various other companies. Such partners include academia, biotech, technical and media companies, as well as manufacturing, research and salesforce-outsourcing providers.
Business models vary widely from shared intellectual property to sharing revenue among several partners. Also, the push strategy, aimed exclusively at selling pharmaceuticals, has shifted towards a pull strategy, which looks to generate demand for products among payers and patients.
I strongly believe that personalized medicine (PM) will change the face of the industry. Personalized medicine will require a whole new process from design, to manufacturing and selling. But most importantly, personalized medicine will offer the chance for healing instead of treating symptoms.
Yes, we are. And many of the most recent M&A deals have demonstrated this, such as Calico, a research and development biotech firm funded by Google and Arthur D. Levinson in 2013.
Recent innovation from the pharmaceuticals industry –besides several new components (MoAs)– has come from the industry understanding that just selling drugs is no longer enough; nowadays we have to provide solutions. This is what drives the industry to include devices and mobile apps to better control compliance and ensure a better outcome.
The most important decision that a pharma or biotech company can make over the coming years will probably be to invest in mobile health.
Yes, companies have to understand that the time for change has come. Fortunately, many companies already know this. For example, we have recently seen impressive innovation strategies from Sanofi and Alnylam (to mention a very big one, on one hand, and a boutique biotech firm, on the other hand).
