Executive VP & Chief U.S. Commercial Officer, Pfizer
Pfizer’s Aamir Malik on Next-Generation Medical Breakthroughs* | The Atlantic Festival 2023
Aamir Malik, the executive vice president and chief business innovation officer of Pfizer, shares insights on the next generation of medical breakthroughs. Underwritten by Pfizer.
*This session is produced by our underwriter and is independent (https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/fil...) of The Atlantic’s editorial staff
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About Aamir Malik
Aamir Malik, Executive Vice President and Chief Business Innovation Officer at Pfizer, spoke at The Atlantic Festival 2023 and the CNBC Work Summit in 2023. At The Atlantic Festival, Malik discussed Pfizer's focus on antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) as a technology for cancer treatment, describing them as "guided missiles" that seek out and destroy cancer cells. He stated that Pfizer was proposing the acquisition of Seagen, which he called the world leader in ADCs, and said the company had deployed "the largest amount of resource in its recent history" to advance cancer research. Malik also highlighted Pfizer's "Accord for a Healthier World" initiative, under which the company committed to delivering all its current and future medicines and vaccines on a non-profit basis to 1.2 billion people in the 45 poorest countries. At the CNBC Work Summit, Malik discussed Pfizer's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the role of the company's purpose—"breakthroughs that change patients' lives"—as a guiding principle. He described how manufacturing colleagues were called "heroes" for showing up daily to produce medicines, while research staff worked to find a cure. Malik also spoke about Pfizer's approach to innovation, including efforts to reduce bias in decision-making and to tap into external scientific developments, noting that this strategy helped bring solutions during the pandemic. He mentioned that Pfizer aimed to shorten drug development timelines, stating that taking three years out of the process could accelerate bringing medicines to patients.
Transcript (10 segments)
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Host0:00
And now for a session produced by our underwriter here for Courage and Collaboration: How to Make the Impossible Possible. Please welcome Aamir Malik, Executive Vice President and Chief Business Innovation Officer at Pfizer.
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Aamir Malik0:24
We Came in Dows is a book written by Cynthia Salvadori. It tells the story of families that emigrated from the Asian subcontinent to Kenya and East Africa in the early 1900s. It tells the story of my grandparents. It tells the story of my parents. And as somebody who was born and raised in East Africa, these stories held great meaning for me. And they held great meaning because they were the stories of courage: people who left their ancestral homelands to seek out something entirely new and exciting. And they were the stories of collaboration: people from very different cultures, religions, ethnicities that somehow found a way to not only live together but to lift each other. So these stories of courage and collaboration shaped my values as a young child, but they also shaped and continue to shape who I am as a professional in life sciences.
Today is an incredibly exciting time to be in life sciences. Every single day we read about a new discovery that is quite honestly mind-blowing. Scientists have applied AI—we just heard about AI—to help a stroke victim restore her speech after she had not spoken in over 20 years. Researchers at MIT have developed a wearable ultrasound bra that can detect breast cancer in real time. There's other scientists who are working on developing a mobile vaccine printer that can literally print hundreds of vials of vaccine in a rural community in a single day.
These examples are incredibly inspiring, but if you take a moment and think about what it takes to take an invention like that and actually make it real—to put it in the hands of patients—it's incredibly difficult. You need scientists to invent and validate the science. You need regulators who can understand it and approve it. You need manufacturers who can actually build it and scale it. You need providers who can understand it and prescribe it to patients. You need to build a commercial infrastructure to get this technology to every corner of the world. And you need to do all of that while being mindful of the cost of the healthcare system. Doing all of that is not something for the faint of heart. Doing something like that requires courage and it requires collaboration. People cannot do it alone.
At Pfizer, our purpose is to deliver breakthroughs that change patients' lives. That's what we're about. And embracing courage and collaboration has always been part of our DNA. Whether it was bringing penicillin to the world during World War II, or developing with our partners BioNTech the world's first approved COVID-19 vaccine, this is what we do and this is who we are. And I want to take today and just share with all of you three examples of how we're continuing to embrace courage and collaboration.
So the first is the courage to go big. If the last three years have taught us anything, it's understanding the power of what can happen when you are all in on something. We're taking our experience and we've made the decision to go all in on defeating cancer. One in every three people on the planet will at some point in their lifetime be diagnosed with cancer. So if we can defeat cancer, the kind of impact that we can have on humanity—it's almost unthinkable. And it starts with technology. Today we have AI technology that helps us understand the molecular circuitry of a cell and what causes cancer to grow. Now what we need are therapies and technologies that can identify and kill those cancers. And that's where ADCs come in. ADCs are a type of technology called antibody drug conjugates. You can think of them as guided missiles. They look for a cancer cell, they find it, they seek it out, and they destroy it in a very pinpointed way while doing minimal damage to healthy cells around that. We believe that ADCs have the potential to do for cancer what we're already starting to see mRNA do for vaccines. And it's the reason why we're going all in on cancer and going all in on ADCs. Pfizer has deployed the largest amount of resource in its recent history to go and take the fight to cancer. We are proposing the acquisition of a company called Seagen that is the world's leader in ADCs to help bring them together with Pfizer and advance their incredible technology. Together, we're convinced that we can take a cancer moonshot and turn it into a cancer moon landing.
Now sometimes you have to have the courage to not buy something. If you look at the biotech world, so much exciting innovation is taking place in small biotechs all over the world. Now typically what happens is that a biotech company will develop a drug, they'll advance it, and at some point—not all the time, but many times—a large pharmaceutical company will acquire that drug, take it through to the finish line, and commercialize it. And we certainly do lots of that. However, we think that there is a bigger role that we can play. And that's why we created Pfizer Ignite. Our idea with Pfizer Ignite is to literally do that: ignite the biotech innovation system. So what we're doing is we're providing financial support, strategic advice, and bringing all of our capabilities to provide operational support to biotechs all over the world. And we're doing it with no strings attached. In one of our recent collaborations, we've already helped a biotech company take one of its cancer drugs and eliminate two years from its development timeline. That is two years sooner that patients will get that therapy. We think if we can get this right, this is a win for biotechs, it's a win for us because it gives us line of sight to future innovation, but most importantly, it's a win for patients to get access to better medicines faster.
And sometimes we need the courage to do something that has never ever been done before. Now most biotech companies are focused on developing a particular drug in a particular therapeutic area. Our partnership with Flagship Pioneering aims to do something entirely different. Flagship Pioneering is a company that is not a biotech; it is a company that invents companies that can not only produce one drug but produce platforms that can make multiple drugs. Let me give you an example. One of Flagship's companies is called Metaphore. Now the team at Metaphore took their inspiration from the owl butterfly. The owl butterfly commits something called biomimicry: it channels the power of an owl by replicating the owl's eye in its wings. Now the team at Metaphore is looking at this concept of biomimicry and combining it with machine learning to try and understand how can we better look at biological reactions in nature and what can that teach us about drug discovery. And Metaphore is just one example of dozens of companies that Flagship Pioneering has. Now when we take those dozens of companies and we combine it with the scientific, regulatory, and drug development and commercial expertise that we have at Pfizer, we've joined forces to develop 10 drugs that do not exist today that we will imagine jointly, invent to address the most devastating diseases on this planet. It's something different, but if we want to make a difference, we believe we have to do it differently.
Now if I give you all these examples—our collaboration with Seagen on ADCs, what we're doing with Pfizer Ignite, our partnership with Flagship Pioneering—all of these things only matter if we can bring these medicines to patients. And not just some patients, but all patients. It's one of the reasons I'm so incredibly proud of our Accord for a Healthier World, it's a Pfizer initiative where we have made a commitment to take every single one of our medicines and vaccines that we have today and that we will have forever in the future, and we will deliver those on a non-profit basis to 1.2 billion people in the 45 poorest countries in the world. And for a kid who grew up in East Africa to see the science that I have the privilege of working on today reach patients in a truly new and novel way is an incredibly compelling circle made complete.
Now, courage and collaboration are not just immigrant values, they're not just Pfizer values, they're not just life science values. I fundamentally believe that these are values that all of us, both as individuals and as part of the organizations that we belong to, can embrace to take a step towards betterment and to take a step towards innovation. We just all need to figure out how we want to do that. Thank you for your time.