Recently, AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant, reached R&D cooperation with Benevolentai and Scorpion Therapeutics within one day.
According to the agreement, AstraZeneca will use their artificial intelligence drug development platform to accelerate the development of new drugs for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and heart failure (HF), and develop innovative anti-cancer therapies for transcription factors that are difficult to become drugs.
As early as 20 19, AstraZeneca reached an R&D agreement with BenevolentAI to jointly develop innovative therapies for chronic kidney diseases and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The latest agreement further expands the cooperation between the two parties and adds the above two diseases to the R&D cooperation.
In cooperation with Scorpion Therapeutics, AstraZeneca hopes to combine the integrated discovery platform of Scorpion Therapeutics with its own expertise in cancer precision medical development to overcome the challenge of targeted transcription factors.
In recent years, AstraZeneca has been very active in the layout of digital medical care.
On 20021,AstraZeneca set up its East China headquarters in Hangzhou, focusing on the research and development of new drugs, medical devices and medical data with the help of new retail in e-commerce, mobile medical care and internet industries, and introducing a new retail model of innovative pharmacies.
Judging from the above actions, AstraZeneca is increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional staffing of pharmaceutical companies. Why will it become an "alternative" in the pharmaceutical industry?
Benevolent AI and scorpion therapy belong to AI drug discovery company.
Among them, Benevolent AI was founded on 20 13, and its headquarters is in London, England. According to the financing amount, BenevolentAI has become the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in Europe, ranking the top five in the world.
At present, the company has established a proprietary AI drug discovery platform, which combines the scientific expertise of about 300 world-class scientists and technicians with complete wet laboratory capabilities, and can deliver new drug candidates with high probability.
Its existing pipeline alone may serve more than 260 million patients, with a market opportunity of more than 30 billion yuan.
The company's business departments are divided into benign biology and benign technology.
AstraZeneca values Benevolent's comprehensive capabilities in knowledge map, Al drug discovery platform and wet laboratory facilities.
Another company, Scorpion Therapeutics, is a precision oncology company. Founded in 2020, it is headquartered in Boston, USA, focusing on the research and development of the next generation of precision drugs for cancer and tumor.
The company combines genomics, protein omics, medicinal chemistry and new target recognition on one platform, and has launched the research and development plan of precision tumor 2.0 drug.
This cooperation with AstraZeneca is based on its 2.0 plan, hoping to develop therapeutic candidate drugs for "incurable" non-enzymatic targets and internally discovered protein targets, so as to achieve first-class and first-class drug research and development in the same field.
Generally speaking, one of these two companies has rich experience in the AI pharmaceutical industry and has a mature R&D pipeline; There is a company with accurate positioning and sufficient competitive potential in the field of cancer diseases. AstraZeneca takes a fancy to these two companies, which is to choose "deepening and refining" drug research and development.
New drug research and development is a multi-link, long-term and high-risk project, which mainly includes four stages: drug discovery, preclinical research, clinical research and approval for marketing.
However, from the perspective of human diseases, there are more than 20,000 genes encoding protein, of which 10%- 15% is related to diseases, and less than 700 genes can be used as targets of small molecule drugs. The easy goals have been developed, and the rest are difficult or difficult to become drugs, which requires more time and economic cost to succeed.
The acceleration of this process has opened a breakthrough for the problems of long drug research and development cycle, low success rate and high cost of traditional pharmaceutical companies.
AstraZeneca was founded in 1999 by the merger of two pharmaceutical companies.
In the development of more than 20 years, it has different "living methods" in different times, from independent research and development of new drugs to agent sales, from research and development of new drugs to medical services, from innovation incubation to capital cooperation.
The development of AstraZeneca can be divided into the following stages:
At the beginning of its establishment, AstraZeneca formed a competitive advantage by virtue of three patented products for chronic diseases, covering the front-end R&D cost with the scale of the terminal market, and its development in the 20th century was smooth and smooth.
However, in the first decade of 2 1 century, AstraZeneca continued to "eat" patents, the research and development cost of new drugs remained high, and the research and development efficiency was far less than that of innovative small companies, so it began to move its research and development center to third world countries while maintaining the global price system.
This situation has led to a serious "green-yellow gap" in AstraZeneca's internal product line.
Subsequently, after 20 10 years, AstraZeneca's patent "sit on the mountain and watch the tiger fight" and gradually lost its patent protection. Generally speaking, under the protection of the patent system, innovative drug manufacturers can not only resist the imitation of other pharmaceutical companies, but also have time to develop new innovative drugs and cultivate emerging markets.
However, AstraZeneca, which is still not out of the patent trough, can only refuse Pfizer's annexation invitation, and at the same time greatly increase R&D investment, M&A frequency and sales.
According to incomplete statistics, only in 20 15 years, the number of AstraZeneca acquisitions reached 14, of which 4 transactions exceeded $2 billion.
In 20 16, AstraZeneca was sold again in a centralized way, and the quantity reached 1 1, involving small molecular infection departments and anesthesiology departments.
A series of slimming actions laid the foundation for AstraZeneca's follow-up route.
20 15 is an important year in the development of AstraZeneca.
During this year, the company put forward new business innovation ideas and market strategies, and announced that it would gradually change from a traditional foreign-funded pharmaceutical enterprise to a platform-based enterprise for innovative drugs.
During this period, AstraZeneca accelerated its "cross-border" cooperation with partners in the fields of pharmacy, equipment, diagnosis, digitalization and capital, and went deep into the capillaries of the grassroots market.
In 20 19, China market became AstraZeneca's second largest market for the first time, accounting for one-fifth of the total revenue. AstraZeneca even beat Pfizer and became the market leader in China.
In 2020, AstraZeneca ranked first in the China market, with an annual income of $5.375 billion, while Merck ranked second and Roche ranked third both earned $3.5 billion, far behind AstraZeneca.
At this point, AstraZeneca was relieved by the "stable output" in China. Until the epidemic came, AstraZeneca was pushed again.
The combination of digital technology and various industries has played a decisive role in the epidemic situation, especially in the medical and health industry. The operation of offline hospitals has been hindered by the epidemic, but the medical needs of the people are increasing, and Internet medical care has ushered in the strongest growth in history.
202 1, Wang Leyan said in an interview, "AstraZeneca's main business is still selling medicine, but why do you have to remember that others take medicine?"
In AstraZeneca's vision, pharmaceutical companies are no longer just drug sales, but "innovative platform companies, platform companies that provide comprehensive services for patients".
If pharmaceutical companies focus all their energy and resources on advanced treatment based on their own product lines instead of early warning, disease diagnosis and post-treatment management, it will undoubtedly increase the burden on patients and medical insurance.
But if your business model changes from selling drugs to selling services, you are willing to work hard on digital marketing, which can not only help you find potential users, increase sales, cover the long tail of the original drug sales, but also deliver other upstream and downstream new products to users.
In essence, this is also an inevitable move to cater to the changes in consumer psychology and methods in the digital economy era.
In the long run, the effect of digitalization will definitely appear. The more target groups and times affected, the better the effect and the lower the marginal cost.
So besides selling drugs, there is a lot of work to be done in other links. For example, relying on the Internet of Things technology, we will gradually build a healthy Internet of Things network connecting medical institutions in different regions and at different levels to realize the whole process management of patients from prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment to rehabilitation.
Another example is to seek the support of various local partners.
One of the most important points is that China's vast market, China's local medical habits and China's digital environment have laid the foundation for AstraZeneca to create the "China Model", which has been copied all over the world.
In 2020, AstraZeneca released the "Wulin Call Order" for AI medical treatment, seeking cooperation with top artificial intelligence companies at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
At the beginning of 20021,AstraZeneca frequently promoted business cooperation and announced its transformation into a platform company, with many layouts in digitalization and innovation ecology.
From the perspective of foreign cooperation, AstraZeneca plans to launch 200 products to support the revenue target of $654.38+0.5 billion, including self-research, joint development, agency and investment.
These include cooperation with dozens of pharmaceutical companies such as Kunyao Group (medical health), Zero Krypton Technology (medical big data), Junshi Bio (star company listed in Hong Kong stocks), Omron (instrument company) and Orange Home (digital medical solution provider);
Introduce their own incubated enterprises such as Dr. Zeqiao (medical informatization), Neptune Star (chain pharmacy), Shen Zhi Science and Technology (ultrasonic AI) and Dizhe Medicine into their own life science innovation park;
And established cooperative relations with CICC Capital, Gaoyao Venture Capital, Tiger Medicine, Yunfeng Fund and Honghui Capital.
From the perspective of internal structure adjustment, AstraZeneca set up a brand-new business unit-omni-channel business unit in China in early 2022, covering county chronic diseases business unit, retail business unit, community business unit, Fei Ying business unit and Wu Dong county market.
In addition, in terms of personnel transfer, AstraZeneca has set up a new vice-president position to be responsible for digitalization, and integrated AstraZeneca's it team, Smart Health Innovation Center, International Life Science Innovation Park and digital business, pointing to the layout of channels and digitalization.
In short, AstraZeneca wants to be the BAT of the pharmaceutical industry.
As Wang Leyan, president of China District, said, "If you think this has nothing to do with your core treatment field, try to let others do it. Don't touch it, let others touch it, and you are the meeting host. Don't think about the content, just participate. Or the car assembly plant, we can do the final assembly work. "
At present, with the blessing of various procurement policies and digital technology, a large number of pharmaceutical companies are following the trend of the times and thinking about new ideas for enterprise transformation.
Among them, there is a big health field like Kunyao Group, which has expanded the consumer groups and scale.
There are companies like Hengrui Pharma, while developing generic drugs, supporting the research and development of innovative drugs with greater cash flow;
There are also small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies like Yahong Pharmaceutical, which have shrunk the scale of drug research and development and made their own way in the generic drug market.
But more often, pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca have become platform companies, as have Novartis, Takeda and Pfizer.
After Novartis global CEO Wan took office, Novartis began to transform into a medical and health company driven by data science and digital technology from 20 18, and reached cooperation with Tencent Smart Medical and Ark Jianke to explore more possibilities of innovative management mode.
Takeda, the largest pharmaceutical company in Asia, did not adopt the mode of digital innovation in the whole process of giant pharmaceutical companies, but added digital modules to the existing core product lines to solve the urgent needs digitally.
For example, after the acquisition of Shire by 20 17, Takeda immediately completed the global reorganization, focusing its business resources on core businesses such as cancer, digestive organs and central nervous system, and built three projects around these core drugs, namely, gastrointestinal disease data, service for mental patients, new drug discovery and incubator of AI plus.
Pfizer, on the other hand, began to increase the layout of new sales channels in 2020 because of the implementation of the policy of purchasing with quantity in China, and announced the establishment of a separate market development team at the beginning of 20021to develop new digital platforms, e-commerce channels, Internet hospitals, government partners and many other new initiatives to support all business departments.
In short, these enterprises are doing digital layout.
On the one hand, they see the future trend: digital knowledge and information become new key production factors, and platformization is to reshape new production relations in the innovative economy.
On the other hand, due to the COVID-19 epidemic and the new medical reform, the external environment forced the digital transformation of pharmaceutical companies to be put on the agenda.
From Ai Yao to R&D cooperation, from traditional pharmaceutical companies to platform giants, the digital transformation of pharmaceutical companies implies more propositions of the times and reflects the changes in the needs of industries and enterprises themselves.
The development of pharmaceutical companies should keep up with the general trend of the times, and the combination of "AI+ digitalization" is an inevitable trend of pharmaceutical companies in the future.
Leifeng. com