You've already gone through one pandemic. Let's hope there's not another, although a lot of people predict that there will be in our lifetimes. Do you feel like we're better prepared for a future one to come?
Frankly, I think we are worst prepared.
The things that happened during that period of time were magical.
Magical in the way that we were able to achieve things that we didn't think that we could. And why is that? Because we have a fantastic collaboration between the public and private sector. But suddenly it has been politicized so much so it became a political debate rather than a scientific or a celebration of human ingenuity.
Albert Bourla is known for achieving impossible things. As the CEO of Pfizer, a company he first joined in 1993, Bourla led the company through COVID-19. He says President Trump called him every week and his team worked around the clock to deliver. Pfizer invented the first FDA-approved COVID vaccine and treatment Paxlovid. Business soared to record revenue. Fast forward to today and Bourla is chasing his next moonshot: solving cancer and other revolutionary drugs like GLP-1s. And the stakes are high. The company is facing a patent cliff for some of its most lucrative drugs and the COVID revenue bump it enjoyed is over. Then there's President Trump, who Bourla says still frequently calls him but for a new reason: he wants Americans to pay less for drugs. In this episode of Titans, Bourla told me about the 10-day deal he reached with the Trump administration that would set the agenda for the entire pharmaceutical industry for the next few years. In our discussion, he also shared how he leads through extreme conditions and how AI will be used in drug discovery.
I'm Alison Shantel and this is Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry. Albert, it is so nice to spend time with you today. Thank you for joining me. So we were discussing that on Monday, March 15th, 1993 was the first day of the rest of your life. It's the day that you joined Pfizer in Greece actually in the animal health department. I want to take us back to that point and a little bit before that. I'm wondering how your upbringing in Greece may have shaped you into the CEO you are today and might have brought you to Pfizer in the first place. I understand your parents were Holocaust survivors. So I just want to understand from you what was about your upbringing that you think helped you position yourself for the CEO spot.
First of all, it's a great pleasure, Alison, to be with you. I have watched many of your podcasts and they are all wonderful and I'm very proud that you invited me to be part of it. I grew up in a middle-class family. My parents, they were not very rich but we had everything we needed. We grew up in an environment that we were very well protected from my father who had a very big ambition to become a scientist and of course he couldn't. He wanted me to become a scientist. So I got that I think from him. From my mom I got more her personality drive. She was someone that was extremely optimistic in life. She would think that every obstacle is an opportunity to do something better and she would think that nothing is impossible. And she would use her experience of surviving the Holocaust which was quite dramatic because she was scheduled to be executed and she was placed in front of a firing squad but a Christian relative paid bribes and it was successful at the last moment so they removed her from the line and moved her back and she could hear the machine guns killing everybody else. So from her perspective, she could be someone who will bring to me hate for those that did that but to us, never. She was always bringing to me life is miraculous. I was there and suddenly I survived and look at me now. I have you and your sister. So nothing is impossible. So that's my mom. So I think I took that from her.
Yeah. So a love of science and a resilience and an optimism despite the hardship. That's an incredible foundation. So you joined Pfizer and it's unique to be able to build a career within one place over the course of 30 plus years. I'm curious if you look back on your time at Pfizer, was there a key milestone moment where you felt like, oh wow, I could be the company CEO. I could be on that path?
Only very, very late in my career. I joined Pfizer in Greece and I didn't want to join the industry. My vision at that time was to become a professor, work in academia which is where I was working. I was doing my PhD in addition to be a veterinarian. But Pfizer really wanted someone there and they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. So when I joined Pfizer in Athens from Thessaloniki I was thinking I'm going for a sabbatical but I always... sabbatical but 32 years after I feel that I loved it. So I never looked back. I never missed let me go back to academia. I wanted to do a career in the private sector because I enjoyed the creativity but also the dynamism, the less bureaucracy than the public sector. That was fascinating for me. I was offered very early in my career opportunities to go international to have an international career. So 3 years later I left in '96 and I went to Brussels and then I took now a different role from scientific to marketing and from only Greece to marketing of the entire region. That felt even more intriguing. And then I moved to Poland where my kids were born by the way and I was a country manager and then I became director of Eastern Europe and then I went back to Brussels and then in 2001 I came to the US.
Wow. So a lot of international experience and a lot of different growth opportunities in different departments and exposure to different areas of Pfizer. Correct. You think those were the two really key things to becoming eventually suited for the CEO position?
I don't know if that made me suited for the CEO position but certainly shaped who I am. I had the opportunity to live with so many different cultures within so many different cultures and work with even more because I had international assignments in my career and I learned to be respectful of the difference of the others. I learned to be sensitive as to how you need to behave if you want to achieve results. If you want to inspire people is different things that you need to say to the US and different things that you need to say to Japan. So it's all of that made me having a better understanding of the value of diversity and but also only when you manage diversity the right way.
One of the first moves that you really helped shepherd is to Pfizer had a couple different businesses and you wanted to make it very science focused, less consumer focused and you made a decision to push out the consumer side which was about 25% of Pfizer's revenue at the time. Not a small or easy decision to make. I'm curious how you came in with that kind of conviction to make a big bold change like that versus just kind of seeing the status quo.
Yes, you first of all you were right. It was 25% of the revenues at the time. It was not only consumer, it was two businesses that we divested collectively 25%. The other one was also not scientific based. The main goal was to create a company that it is pure science-based, pure innovation based, a company that will develop innovation that can change the world. I felt that the company had all Pfizer had all the elements to be successful in such a journey and I took the risk and '19 pretty much I devoted to doing that not only divesting business that were not scientific but also changing the culture, changing the capital allocation within the company. I increased the R&D budgets, I increased the digital budgets at '19 so that we can thrive in innovation. And then at the end of the year when we were ready COVID hit.
I want to just kind of stress the magnitude of the change you had to make. One of the stats was that prior to COVID you had been producing about 200 million doses of vaccines per year and you had to scale that to be suddenly 3 billion doses in a year. How do you tackle things like that as an org that just seem unfeasible?
Yeah, that's my mom coming out that nothing is impossible. But how to convince the others? I found out through that process that when you ask people to do things that they are perceived difficult or impossible. The first thing that they do is to use all their brain power to develop the arguments articulated in a PowerPoint presentation why cannot be made. That's always the case. It is the same principles like when you try to do a vaccine in nine months rather than in nine years. But I would say it is equally if not more impressive the manufacturing piece. Usually most of the glory went to our scientists in the lab that made the vaccines but we had so many scientists in the manufacturing site and workers and engineers in the manufacturing sites that did miracles. The same principle: you need to make it, doses will be needed, people is dying. You need to exceed yourself. You need to use ingenuity. Don't try to convince me why you cannot make it. Try to find ways to make it happen. And they do because people when you ask them to do things and they understand that this is a serious request, they deliver more than what they think. Within a week, they stopped worrying how to convince you that cannot be done and they start worrying how they can find ways to overcome the obstacles and make it happen. And this is when they can come and surprise you of how much they can achieve when they are focusing on how to resolve issues and whether when they are all in. That was the secret with Pfizer during the leadership time of COVID.
You had signs over the office that said time is life. And I've heard you describe sort of how you motivated the team a little bit unfairly as emotional blackmail where you would say, 'Imagine if we delay this even a month. I want you to calculate how many more people will die.' That's pretty dramatic. But do you think that was really essential to getting them to kind of stop saying no?
I'm afraid it was. I still believe it was an emotional blackmail because I was asking him to do something impossible and then I was putting on their shoulders the weight that if they don't make it people will die. That happened in several occasions when they came and they said I think we will have 3 weeks delay on that and then I did say why don't you go and calculate how many people will die in 3 weeks and come back and tell me. And I feel a little bit guilty about it but also I know that played a key role in not only saving the world and the economy and the society but make them feel the most important people on earth those that were able to deliver and they will never forget.
During the pandemic. One of the criticisms that Pfizer faced despite coming out with this vaccine was the profiting from it and also how pricing was figured out for other countries throughout the world. I'm wondering if you think that that was handled in the right way. Would you price things differently the next time? Would there be different business considerations in how you would do a future pandemic?
It was priced the right way. I don't have any regrets on that. It was very social sensitive. We had a tier pricing. US and other rich nations they had one tier then middle income countries they had almost half of that and then the low income countries were given almost for free. The US and high income countries, the price that they had to pay was the price of a takeaway meal. As much as you want to buy today or at that time to buy your meal in McDonald's, the COVID would cost the same. So it was very reasonable priced. We made a lot of money because we made three and a half billion doses. Of course, you can make a lot of money when you do that, but it was not sustainable, of course, because of our results. COVID went down, was under control, so you don't have to sell anymore.
Pfizer's COVID vaccine launched its earnings to record highs in 2022, helping the company reach a record-breaking 100 billion in sales. That dropped by about 41% the next year as COVID vaccine sales slowed. Pfizer's stock is still down significantly from its peak in 2021. Pfizer is also facing a patent cliff which means a number of its patents on its high earning drugs are set to expire in the next few years. This would allow for competitors to produce cheaper generics which could significantly hurt Pfizer's sales.
The COVID business was obviously incredible, maybe a one-time bump for your business and you also are facing some very successful patents that people call it the patent cliff. Over the next few years, some very lucrative patents will be rolling off and generic drugs will be able to come onto the market. And so there has been some concern about what does Pfizer's business look like? How can it be healthy? How can it be strong when these two big cash cows for it are diminishing? How are you thinking about building a stable foundation and kind of making up for the lost revenue of those two big money drivers and getting to revenue growth again? I think you said by 2030 or 2029, you expect to be really back there.
That's true. And we expect to be not only back in growth but back in very strong exponential growth. COVID was a great success for the company, skyrocketed us in at all-time highs, saved the world and gave us a lot of profits but was not a sustainable franchise at the level that we experienced it in the years that we had the COVID crisis. In 2022, our COVID revenues went to 56 billion. $56 billion. The next year in '23 they dropped to 12. Now they are around 5. So financially for the company was a major hit and that was reflected in our stock price and that is a different story. You know when you go from a mediocrity to something lesser and very different, if you go from the top of the hill you are the best company you are the best named CEO the people in Pfizer are the most proud employees in the world suddenly to have the financial drop it hurts a lot and that creates emotional reactions to everyone in the company including me. So it was very difficult period for me the year 2023. But I do believe that the winners in life are differentiated from the losers in life because the winners never fall. The winners always stand up again. And that's I think what we did. We invested in '23 billions of dollars in new business development opportunities because we knew that we need to do that to overcome both the COVID losses but also even more importantly the loss of exclusivity the patent cliff that we are going to face starting in '26, '27 and '28. And we did these investments. We went back to rebuild our commercial operations to restore the glory of them. And '24 and '25 were spectacular years in the marketplace. We did significant changes in the research engine and significant acquisitions. So I think we have all the elements that we need to weather the period of what it is ahead of us and emerge very strong with very strong growth which will be based on us changing the lives of millions and millions of patients.
And so you had the vaccine the first year and then the treatment the next year and you overdelivered. I'm curious about what happens after you overdeliver so spectacularly to the team. How do you motivate them to ever to do something else that could ever be as great as that mission that they felt like where they were really saving lives, saving the world really the purpose was so clear? How do you create a next purpose for them? And then as a CEO, how do you create a next purpose for yourself?
We used all the profits that we were able to generate during the COVID period which was significant to reinvest them and the area that we picked was cancer. This is where the bulk of our investments were and for several reasons. One because we were already good at cancer and the second was that we had the fantastic opportunity with the acquisition of Seagen to double down on it but also because cancer is so personal and cancer affects so much the world and affects so much our colleagues and I knew that that's a wonderful pivot: we save the world from COVID now we'll save the world from cancer. So that was the goal and that's what we try to do and I think we are delivering on it. We had some remarkable readouts on cancer. It's not going to be as dramatic like in COVID you don't have a vaccine one day and then next morning you do have a vaccine. Now cancer we are fighting, science fights cancer for decades. So the improvements will be incremental but when you have doubling the survival rate which where we had three or four studies in the next two years in the last two years that we were able in massive cancers in bladder cancer in prostate to double the survival rate, colorectal cancer which is a cancer that affects so many young people that's transformation. Those people are feeling that what they has a purpose that nowhere else can find.
Pfizer is now investing heavily in research and development opportunities which span oncology, biotechnology and new vaccines. The company has been active in the mergers and acquisition sphere as well. At the end of 2025, the company purchased Metsera, a clinical stage biotech company following a contentious monthslong bidding war with Novo Nordisk.
So as you look at your pipeline of products, where do you think is the most value going to be derived in the future? It sounds like cancer is definitely a bucket.
Right now we orient more than 40% of our yearly R&D expenses to cancer.
And how much do you spend on R&D a year?
11 billions approximately.
So it's a significant amount that goes to cancer. This is where we have a dramatic substrate of late first of all of a marketed portfolio in the market right now in the US. We are number third company in cancer but we have a very strong phase three very strong phase two very strong phase one and scientists that really are tackling now cutting edge technologies to be able to deliver solutions for cancer. The next, the wave, Pfizer was always a primary care company and company that thrives in marketplaces where massive manufacturing is needed, massive clinical infrastructure needed, which is the case in primary care and or vaccines, thousands and thousands of patients in clinical trials and massive commercial execution with field forces and marketing teams around the world. And for us the big play on internal medicine was obesity. We went very early with GLP-1s. We believed that GLP-1s could become significant differentiator and we developed very early a pipeline of oral GLP-1s that at the time no one had. Unfortunately, the products didn't work. They had good efficacy actually good tolerability but they had toxicity in the liver which we discovered and of course we stopped the program and that's why now we had all this infrastructure we have the right to win in this marketplace but we don't have the portfolio. And this is where the acquisition of Metsera came that I think positions us now as a second very big driver of growth to be the obesity market.
So I want to talk about the Metsera acquisition because it is big and it's been described as a Game of Thrones between you and Novo Nordisk to acquire that company.
There's only one throne but I don't think you are the king.
It sounds like you made a bid in August. The price went up significantly since I think it was a $7 billion sum that you offered at the time went up to 10. What's it like behind the scenes of a major acquisition like that?
Usually things are moving very fast at the last moment but they are cooking for very, very, very long time. We were flirting with Metsera before they go into an IPO when the founders had just built a pipeline and they were looking for opportunities. We know their pipeline. We were watching it. We did repeated due diligence to see their data. There was a period of time that after their IPO that our molecules had failed. So we felt that's the time to make a move and then we started re-engaging with them. Things were going up and down for a period of time but eventually we were able to sign a deal with them. Took quite a bit of time, took several meetings between me and their principles of their board and the CEO, between our scientists that they met their scientists and we had a deal and everything was moving to a close but then we had this bit from Novo Nordisk that complicated things. So it was I don't know 10 days of wildness as you described it, Game of Thrones.
Any moments where you thought shoot we've lost it?
You know of course I was considering as a possibility but again my mom came out to me.
