Even Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, had to admit that the title of his talk, “Big Pharma as a Catalyst for Change,” had an odd ring to it.
“Catalyst is not a word you often hear in the same sentence as big pharma,” he said in his presentation at HMS on Feb. 13, which was sponsored by the Department of Health Care Policy. By the end of his hour-long remarks—delivered without a note and with Obama-like eloquence—many in the audience appeared ready to accept the title as a reasonable premise.
Witty outlined a sweeping agenda for his company that included efforts to find vaccines and small molecules to target neglected diseases, such as river blindness, that are taking heavy tolls in the developing world, especially in Africa; a commitment to improve the health infrastructure and reduce the cost of drugs in these countries; a program to share research data; and a focus on prevention in the United States and other wealthy nations.
“The majority of costs are driven by a small minority of patients. How do we drive prevention of chronic disease?” he asked.
Witty hoped other pharmaceutical companies would follow suit. “We exist because society allows us to exist, because the balance of value we deliver is roughly equivalent in proportion to the value we extract,” he said.
