Opening comments: Dr Andrew Plump, President of R&D, Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everybody from here where I sit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to across the world. It's such a privilege for me to be part of this very special event, the 15th USA IC Annual Bio Summit. It's my fifth year having the great privilege to serve as master of ceremonies. I'd like to make a few opening comments and then we'll start with an absolutely incredible agenda. If we can get the first slide up please, Priam. We live today in just a remarkable world. We've named our summit over the past couple of years, and it remains this year 'From N of 1 to N of a Billion', and it's meant to signify the great innovation that we're seeing in our industry, innovation that's taking us to the point where we can make therapies tailored to even single patients. That's just remarkable. But we haven't done our jobs unless we can ensure that there's access to these therapies to the billions of patients who live around the world. This past year has been the greatest illustration of that need ever in the history of our industry. Let's look back at innovation over the last decade. We are in the golden era of life sciences. Many believe that in this century we have the opportunity, if we don't get in our own ways, to cure every disease. What we've seen over the last decade has been remarkable. If you look across any number of indicators, let's just go to the US and FDA where we see year on year an increasing number of approvals, and not just approvals of any medicine but of incredibly novel medicines, particularly of advanced therapies like cell and gene therapies. What we've seen in terms of investment in our industry has just been remarkable, and I think we were all blown away at the continued trends that we saw even during the pandemic last year, a nearly 50% year-on-year increase for financing in our industry, just really remarkable. We can go to the next slide please. Preem, yeah. And certainly it's been nine months since we last gathered here at USA IC. The world has changed immensely. We've lived through a pandemic that continues to rage on worldwide. Just two weeks ago we passed a grim milestone: more deaths globally in 2021 than in all of 2020 due to COVID-19. Next slide. Many have called this virus the SARS-CoV-2, by its technical name, the inequality virus. What we've seen is great discrepancies across the world in terms of access to medicines. We even within regions of the world like the United States have seen great inequities across racial groups. This is something that we have to solve collectively as an industry. I'm going to go to the next slide please. Today we see we're coming out of this incredible situation in the US, but we have parts of the world that are still languishing. India, which is a major focus for this group, the sixth largest economy, still only has three percent of its population vaccinated. What we've done though collectively, and hear from Albert Borla just shortly, over the past year has been equally amazing and also humbling. We've come together as an industry, we've collaborated, we found new ways of working, we've accelerated the development of vaccines and therapies in ways that none of us ever would have imagined possible. Let me just say that there are two places that I leave from this pandemic. The first is thinking about pandemics and our responsibility collectively as a life science ecosystem. I would say that if we look back over the last year, we were both incredibly skilled, and the work that came out of so many companies, the collective collaborative efforts of industry, academia, governments, and not-for-profits was truly unprecedented. We were also lucky, let's be realistic. We were lucky we knew that this virus was coming. We weren't prepared as we should have been, and we were lucky that the virus didn't look like SARS or MERS or Ebola. We were lucky in many ways that the mortality rates were only about one percent. But luck isn't a strategy. We have huge learnings that we can take out of this past year and apply them to the future. We have to be ready for the next pandemic because we know that it will come. If we go to the last slide please before I hand off. If we go to the last slide, the slides have come off, Preem. If we can just go to the last slide and I'll just say that I'm an optimist, and you need to be an optimist in our industry. You need to recognize that what we do, if we go to the last slide, what we do is we overcome nature. That's almost magical. I'm a huge optimist and I think that if we go to the next slide please, the last slide, there are better days ahead. They're much better days ahead. We're coming out of an awful pandemic, we're coming out of it with immense learnings, with immense successes, and we're coming out of it in an industry that's fully leveraging and embracing innovation.