AbbVie's Nicholas Donoghoe on Innovation in Drug Development Process

Hello everyone. I want you to take a minute and just imagine. Imagine you're at your doctor's office, you're in an exam room, you've been there a couple times the last few weeks. You've had tests run, you've had blood drawn, you're waiting. You're anxious. You're getting nervous, and then, you finally hear the words: cancer, dementia, and all of a sudden, everything kind of goes still. All your plans just got thrown out the window, and whether that's you, or your parents, or someone in your family you love, you just got thrown down a whole new path. Pretty scary path with a lot of tough questions and difficult choices. A lot of jargon, a lot of things you might not fully appreciate until you're right in the middle of it. Well that's where you are, you're right in the middle of it, of the healthcare paradox. This moment that we all experience, many of us several times, where less is more. Where the less time it takes to find out what's truly wrong, the less time it takes to get on a medicine that can make the biggest difference, the more time you have to live your life, on your terms, doing the things that you love with the people that you love. My company, AbbVie, we were built for that moment. We are racing medicines forward to be there to give you choices, better choices at that moment.

So maybe I'll just share a little bit about who we are, you may have never even heard of AbbVie. We're a relatively young company, we're only about 10 years old. Our medicines actually treat 50 million patients a year. 50 million. They treat 75 different diseases and it's with that experience that I tell you it takes 10 or 15 years to make the next great medicine, to make medicines as great as they were again. 10 or 15 years. My oldest daughter is three. In 15 years she's going to be graduating high school. We can't wait 15 years. Patients need better choices today, families need better options today. So it's with that in mind that our company AbbVie has sort of challenged ourselves to say, hey how could we do this radically different? How could we cut that in half? How could we go twice as fast as we've ever gone before? And so we're here today to share some of those ideas, to hear a lot of your ideas, because I do think together we can find a way.

So what are some of those ideas, they're building on the things we've been talking about today at the summit. The first that we took on was how do we tap into automation and robotics and a lot of the technologies that we've been talking about? What we realize is that the production of medicine, the making, the manufacturing of medicine, was a pretty linear process. It was pretty manual. Well what if you just radically split that apart and did it all in parallel at a much bigger scale? Well we found we could push everything forward and we could actually make those medicines a whole year sooner so they're ready sooner. That's one year.

And then we wondered, how do we tap into AI and machine learning? Well we've been wondering that we thought about it three or four years ago and what we quickly realized was we were sitting on a gold mine of information. No one had ever run as many clinical trials in immunology, in blood cancer, in eye care, than we had. When you started to kind of parse through all that data actually a pattern emerged. It was very clear there really is a better way. So we now know what that blueprint is and we've seen it, put it to work. That blueprint is 50% faster. We took a trial that used to be four years and made it two. Used to be 3 years and made it a year and a half. We know exactly which trials, which endpoints, which design, which patients, which countries, which sites to go to. That saved us another year. So you can start to see you can add a year here, a year there, a year with an idea that maybe you have and all of a sudden you've done something really different there's a lot more medicines available to us all.

But those are just sort of the tactics, the tactical ideas. One thing that was really important for us to think about is also what guides you, what guides you every day, how do you decide to do the right thing each and every day? For us it boiled down to three simple principles. The first is it's got to be remarkable. The world doesn't need another okay medicine, another medicine just like the one that came before it. It needs something great, something that really raises the standard of care. That's easy to say, it's pretty hard to do. The second thing that we realized, we pushed ourselves hard on this, is sure you've got to make great medicines but you haven't done as much good as you wanted to if everybody doesn't have access to them, if you can't navigate the system to get to them. Look I'm a physician, I work in healthcare, if anyone in my family gets sick or my friend's family or my friend's family's family, I end up talking with them. They end up asking me pretty similar questions, pretty practical questions. What is it? How does it work? What are the side effects? When should I call my doctor? Will insurance pay for it? How do I get access to it? Well we realize not everybody has a doctor in their family to call and so we built up a team of experts of nurses for all of our complex patients they all have access to them to be able to ask them exactly those kinds of questions because we think everybody deserves those kinds of answers.

The third thing that we did is we thought long and hard about how do we push ourselves even further? How do you have even longer impact, even cures? So it's with that kind of spirit and that kind of ambition we've been trying to tackle the seemingly impossible. Things like spinal cord injury, stroke, Alzheimer's, and we believe collectively we can get there, we can do it. And so I would close with this, a bit of a challenge to all of us, no matter what industry you're in or what your role is or if it's your patient or your customer your end user. You know what is that big idea you have now that thing you dream about tonight that you want to make happen tomorrow? And we believe that by working cross disciplines and thinking together and sharing ideas that we really collectively can make less be more. Thank you very much, I'm Nicholas Donoghoe on behalf of AbbVie.