Newsroom to Pharma: A Foray Into the Unknown Can be a Good Thing

Sasha Damouni, Director, U.S. Media Relations, Pharmaceuticals, Bayer

Attending scientific events, investor conferences and other high-profile meetings with a fresh perspective is hugely invigorating, and I recommend it. You see, I was a reporter for the last 15 years, hunting for the next M&A scoop, potential clinical trial adverse event, and Wall Street investor scandal. After a lofty decade and a half, this year I decided to take the jump, to what reporters fondly refer to as “the dark side,” a term for the world of public relations, at a 154-year old company, called Bayer.

As a Director of Media Relations for our Pharma business, I thought it would be difficult to re-train my cynical journalist brain. But on my first day at Bayer, I watched a group of patients tell their powerful stories about living with cancer, hemophilia, and multiple sclerosis, and thank us for helping them fight their diseases. Almost, instantly, it settled my mind that this was a company that cared and that made a profound difference.

Attending the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual conference for the first time over the summer, as a newly minted pharma representative and working with a senior Bayer executive to tell our story of our growing oncology pipeline was thrilling and a testament to my career decision. When I saw the army of people it took to find the right patients for our clinical trials and the magnitude of Bayer’s efforts to give back, I wondered why as a journalist I had been looking for all the wrongs that pharma was doing, when there were actually so many rights.

Bayer also sponsors impactful thought-leadership events, and one that springs to mind is the Forbes Healthcare Summit at the end of last month. The conference delves into the latest breakthroughs in science and a myriad of controversial issues from patents to the opioid epidemic. It was so exciting to see Bayer, right alongside the biggest names in healthcare like Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, Allergan, Regeneron, CVS Health, Express Scripts, and CMS. The audience was a top mix of academics, executives, analysts and reporters.

Carsten Brunn, Bayer’s president of pharmaceuticals for the Americas, was the lone pharma executive on a panel, titled “Machine Medicine,” that examined the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to transform healthcare. Other speakers on the panel included healthcare IT gurus, such as Jonathan Bush from athenahealth. The fact that we, as a pharma company, had a seat at this table is a telling sign of things to come.

Carsten’s key message was that the industry is just scratching the surface of applying technologies like machine learning and AI to improve the way we work and how we develop and deliver medicines to patients. The computational capacity available to us and that will be available in years to come is staggering and has tremendous potential to drive decisions and policies, reduce expenses and costs, and create efficiencies. Part of the problem is that we don’t make use of much of the data that’s available to us. In fact, as Carsten noted, large pharma is sitting on 63% of unanalyzed data — with the promise that this data has colossal importance for our businesses and for patient care.

The Forbes Summit got me thinking that despite the fact there have been many key milestones in pharma over the last two decades, with the invention of the genome to the introduction of monoclonal antibodies, I believe we are fundamentally still at the tip of the iceberg of innovation. We have so much to look forward to, with AI as one example, but over the next 10 years, there may be cures for rare disease via gene-editing and at home visual devices that allow us to monitor congenital health issues.

It’s a good time to be in pharma, now more than ever. I certainly did make the right decision to take the jump, and will never look back.