Where Big Pharma Meets Academia: Key Trends I’m Watching

The most important thing that universities can offer the business community is adding new technologies, new state of the art expertise and innovation.
My name is Dana Bar-On. My job is, I'm the Head of Academic Collaborations at Teva Global R&D
The three trends I'm most excited about are:
First, building really creative collaborations with big pharma, start-ups, patient organizations, academia and medical centers, HMOs and everyone bringing everyone together to one puzzle, to solve all the big challenges that we have to face together in the industry.
The second trend is incorporating artificial intelligence technologies into the drug discovery and development.
And the third one is really investing the young generation of researchers to build them as young entrepreneurs and by this, bridge the gap between industry and academia already from the first stages of the training in the universities.
The first trend is building new collaborations. I think that COVID-19 really brought us to the understanding that everyone should work together in the aim of one goal. We should all share our expertise and tools and capabilities in order to accelerate drug discovery and development. So everyone should sit at the same table - big pharma, start-ups, patient organizations, HMOs, academia and industry together, to join forces and to build together the future medicine.
This we are doing at Teva in several ways. We are building a large consortia as part of the European Union. We are working with the Israeli eco-system to bring new collaborations into Teva and to develop together with academic partners new therapeutics for Teva and for the future of patients' community.
The next trend that I'm really fascinated about is artificial intelligence and the way it can develop and contribute to drug development and discovery. You really see all the technology is penetrating very slowly but surely into the drug development area. Just this year we opened up AION. This is a unique collaboration of four big pharma, together with a VC fund, the Israeli biotechnology fund and Amazon the giant IT to develop drug discovery via tools of artificial intelligence. This is really exciting for me to see the way artificial intelligence enters into the biology and the bio-med and biotech worlds and I think we are going to see this trend really develop over the years to come.
The third trend that I'm most excited about is actually training the new generation of scientists into translational and more innovative thinking. At Teva we build for the last three years a large forum of PhD and post-doc students that are very much interested in entrepreneurship and in building more translational research. We are helping them translate their research from their PhD into drugs and new projects and new products. We are helping them adopt a new mindset that is more prone for entrepreneurship and innovation. I really think it's important to start this very early at your academic training because this will accelerate later on the translational aspects of bridging the gap from industry to academia. I believe that when industry and academy join forces together, the patients really benefit from this.
If you have a good idea of how to collaborate with the outside world, how to build new collaborations with academic or medical centers, please approach us, please give your ideas.