Day 1: Monday, May 4, 2015
8:00 am Short Course Registration and Morning Coffee
9:00 -12:00 pm Short Course 1: Building a Truly Impactful Alliance Management Community of Practice: The Keys to Success - View Details
Stuart Kliman, J.D., Partner, Vantage Partners
Many organizations look to drive alliance management capability through the development and implementation of an Alliance Management Community of Practice. Unfortunately, most of those efforts fail to create the desired value. This workshop is designed to walk you through the steps necessary to create a strong, sustainable and impactful Alliance Management Community of Practice.
1:30-4:30 Short Course 2: Why and How to Enhance Strategic Collaboration between Sponsors and CROs - View Details
Jonathan Hughes, Partner, Vantage Partners
Alliances and strategic partnerships (between large pharma companies, small bio-techs, and academic institutions) are increasingly pervasive. But what about alliances between bio-pharma companies and CROs? Are true partnerships with CROs (and other suppliers) really possible? What are the risks and benefits of moving beyond a traditional customer-vendor paradigm? In this interactive workshop, we will explore these and other issues using a number of case studies, and will also discuss how to adapt best practices for strategic outsourcing from other industries to the clinical development context.
*Separate registration required
4:00 Conference Registration
5:00 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Stuart Kliman, J.D., Partner, Vantage Partners
5:05 KEYNOTE PROGRAM:The Changing Landscape of Biopharmaceutical Alliances, Challenges in Alliance Management and Outlook for Continued Success
Join us for this opening keynote session featuring discussions by Alliance Management leaders on trends, challenges and the future of biopharmaceutical partnerships.
Dana Hughes
Vice President & Global Head, Integration and Alliance Management, Worldwide Business Development Group, Pfizer
The pharmaceutical industry has a very strong history of partnering and alliances. For products currently in the marketplace, a significant number are sourced from business development, either through acquisition or, more commonly, some type of partnering, joint venture or alliance. As a result, in our experience, most pharmaceutical managers come to new alliances already acutely aware of the value of collaboration. They recognize partnering as critical to their success. This creates a different performance environment for an alliance manager. At Pfizer, we strongly differentiate between the alliance function, a very small core of professionals at the center, and alliance capability, which we aim to strengthen at multiple levels throughout the company. Our priority is to build on the existing alliance capability within our businesses, while maintaining a highly leveraged corporate alliance team to ensure success of our most important deals. Pfizer BD sees this balance as critical to the success of our deals, a match to expectations in our potential partner set and an appropriate match to Pfizer’s strengths. Recognizing that many peers see significant value in a more functional approach to alliance support, with larger central corporate alliance teams, we intend to display our model – as well as discuss its advantages and disadvantages. All participants should see how they can plug easily into Pfizer’s partnering capability.
Erin Brubaker
Vice President, Alliance Management, Worldwide Business Development; Head, Alliance Management Center of Excellence, GlaxoSmithKline
We have some brilliant scientists at GSK, but we know that many great ideas come from brilliant scientists outside of our company, which is why collaborating with other businesses, organizations, academics, and venture firms are a fundamental part of our business strategy. Some collaborations fuel our discovery and development efforts to find differentiated medicines; some extend our ability to deliver medicines to patients in emerging markets; and others help us to continuously improve our ways of working. In this respect, we’re not necessarily unique. Across the life sciences industry we spend billions each year on collaborations of all sizes and shapes with the hope that by working together we will deliver more innovative medicines, devices, and diagnostics for patients, and in turn, generate greater value for our shareholders. We all have our own stories to tell on these collaborations and our approaches to working with alliance partners. The GSK approach may be unique. We focus on the evolution of alliance management to address the needs of the diverse types of collaborations we enter into. By sharing our approach, we hope you will see an organization that understands the value of partnering across the whole lifecycle and all therapeutic areas. We welcome learning more about your approach to alliances, as we continue to look for creative, mutually beneficial collaborations that will provide the best solutions for patients.
6:05 Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Hall (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
7:30 End of Day
Day 2: Tuesday, May 5, 2015
8:00 Interactive Breakout Discussion Groups and Speed Networking
Grab a cup of coffee and delve deeper into some of the overarching concerns facing alliances today. These are moderated roundtables with brainstorming and interactive problem solving, allowing conference participants from diverse backgrounds to have frank discussion while exchanging ideas, experiences, and developing future collaborations around a focused topic.
Table 1: Alliance Management at the Forefront of Deal Making
One of the principle roles of an alliance manager is to manage the collaboration based on an agreed upon contract. Ahead of the contract signing, during the negotiation process, alliance managers are in a unique position to provide input based on the management of past deals. This group will explore ways in which Alliance Management can get involved earlier in the deal making process, transferring the knowledge and experience of managing other partnerships.
At what point should Alliance Management get involved in the deal making process?
What contributions can an alliance manager make to the negotiation process?
How would a partner perceive Alliance Management at the table? What message would that deliver about your company's approach to partnership?
What steps are required to gain alignment in your own organization about the role of Alliance Management in the deal making process?
Table 2: Alliance Launch
Organizations commit significant resource to alliance deals that are central components of the organization’s long term strategy. Too often, however, such deals get “thrown over the fence” from those who identify the asset, to those responsible for negotiating and closing the deal, to those finally responsible for managing the working relationship with the partner organization. This group will explore some of the challenges and some best practices for launching an alliance for success.
How, if at all, does your organization employ a systematic approach to launch alliances?
What are the initial challenges, necessities and opportunities during an alliance launch?
Table 3: Effective Measurement of the Value of Alliance Management – A Holy Grail?
While the discipline of alliance management is well established, organizations continue to struggle to effectively communicate their value internally, including to senior management. This group will explore some different ways across the industry that companies are using to communicate the value, discuss possible benefits and limits of each in the context of participants’ own experiences, and identify gaps in the approach Alliance Management groups take that make it difficult to articulate the value they deliver.
What are the typical measures of alliance success (overall alliance success, not just relationship measures) included in an individual's performance metrics?
What other performance metrics related to the success of the alliance relationship are used on alliance-involved stakeholders to quantify value?
Table 4: Changing Your Corporate Alliance Mindset: What Works / What Doesn’t
How do you build a compelling vision and mission?
What are the core competencies & capabilities required?
How do you get CEO & senior management engagement?
What questions should senior management ask as they implement policies, processes, SOPs that will apply to (and possible conflict with) partners.
How do you manage “toxic” personnel?
Ensuring alliance management excellence requires internal alignment, governance and frameworks to measure the value of the AM function against other strategic objectives within an organization. This session provides discussions detailing core activities and measures of alliance management quality as foundational tools supporting the AM function.
9:15 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Lena Frank, Executive Director, Program and Alliance Management, Eisai
9:20 Internal Alliance Governance Board
Lena Frank, Executive Director, Program and Alliance Management, Eisai
Who in your organization sets and oversees the overreaching strategy of alliances? Where do you take discussions about strategic issues, challenges, risks, and potential disputes before they become a serious concern? Who evaluates the performance and health of your alliances? How do you showcase the value of the alliance management function? If you don’t have an Internal Alliance Governance Board in place, attend this session and learn more about the value of the governance board.
9:50 Measuring Alliance Management: Quantify Your Value by Showing How You Mitigate Risk and Solve Problems
Brent Harvey, Director, Alliance Management and M&A Integration, Office of Alliance Management, Eli Lilly and Company
Even though alliance managers have been around for more than 15 years, many of us still get the question, “what do you do?” This presentation will provide a framework for how you can describe and categorize the services you provide as an alliance manager. We will also describe how to measure your contribution and value through four lenses: portfolio value, dollar savings, alliance health, and client satisfaction.
10:20 Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)
10:35 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall
AM capabilities are put to the test during segments of the lifecycle where conflict or mistrust impede maximizing the overall value of the alliance. Here, the well-developed competencies of instilling and maintaining shared trust and culture, particularly during moments of unforeseen crisis, can mean the difference between a complete breakdown, and overcoming these innate challenges.
11:00 Diagnosing and Fixing Mistrust and Lack of Shared Culture
Varavani Dwarki, Ph.D., Worldwide Head, Alliance Management Oncology, Sanofi
Trust is the most important currency of any successful alliance; organizations and individuals should strive hard to create a trusted environment through individual behaviors and implementing best practices to create collaboration culture. In this talk, consequences of mistrust will be highlighted and practical suggestions on how to detect early trust problems and steps that need to be taken in organizations to build an alliance centric culture will be discussed.
11:30 Managing Alliance Crisis and Public Statements
Mike Berglund, Director, Alliance Management, Eli Lilly and Company
This presentation will provide real world lessons of managing unforeseen crisis and public statements. Years of alliance equity and strong relationship can dissolve quickly when two companies confront a crisis or have to make a public statement.
12:00 pm Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Lunch on Your Own
Effective alliance management has the potential to dramatically impact an organization's competitive advantage within the highly collaborative landscape of drug development. It is therefore no surprise that significant emphasis is now being placed on developing organization-wide, internally aligned capabilities, systems for constant assessment and improvement, as well as adapting alliance best practices to evolve with organizational change. This session features discussions illustrating new initiatives within biopharma firms creatively leveraging years of experiences to blaze new paths.
1:25 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Stuart Kliman, J.D., Partner, Vantage Partners
1:30 The Sanofi Case Study of Building an Effective Alliance Management Organization
Frank Grams, Ph.D., Vice President, Head, Alliance Management & Transactions, Sanofi
This presentation will highlight Sanofi’s internal efforts for continued organizational improvements; experiences with KPIs on the alliance portfolio; and experiences with internal training of Alliance Management.
2:00 Alliance Management Initiatives at Bayer
Michael Kennedy, Ph.D., MBA, Director, Alliance Management, Business Development & Licensing, Bayer HealthCare
Partnering effectively means being able to continually improve your alliance capability. This presentation will look at a variety of different methodologies for assessing alliance capability and then a framework for looking at different areas of that capability - Strategic — Extent to which the company is oriented for partnering success; Operational — Extent to which the capabilities and processes to support effective joint alliance execution and Mindset/Culture — Extent to which leadership and incentives ensure the appropriate behaviors. An implementation plan for improvement will be discussed with practical examples for building on strengths and managing weaknesses.
2:30 Building Capabilities While Rapidly Expanding the Portfolio
Angus Grant, Ph.D., Vice President, Business Development & Global Alliances, Celgene Corporation
3:00 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall
3:30 Setting a New Standard in Alliance Management at Baxter BioScience
Mark Coflin, Senior Director, Alliance Management, Global Business Development & Licensing, Baxter BioScience
Baxter BioScience (soon to be Baxalta) is setting a new standard in how we work together with companies and with partners. As Baxter BioScience becomes Baxalta in mid-2015, we are prioritizing an external innovation model with the goal of becoming the partner of choice. We are applying best practices that are standard within the industry, but also taking a fresh approach to develop a world-class alliance management function that will enhance our partnerships across our therapeutic areas of Hemophilia & Blood Disorders, Oncology and Immunology. I’ll discuss how to engender that spirit and that enthusiasm to get the support from the senior leaders which is critically important in getting off the ground and moving quickly.
4:00 Establishing a Central Integration Management Capability
Nick Dunscombe, Head, Global Alliance Management, Centre of Excellence, AstraZeneca
This presentation will summarize the work within AstraZeneca to establish a central integration management capability. This is built upon a similar model for alliance management and harnesses similar skills and capabilities.
4:30 Enhancing Your Organizational AM Capability: Beyond the AM Function
Stuart Kliman, J.D., Partner, Vantage Partners
Alliance functions know that their organizations are not designed to work in support of alliance execution. Most struggle, however, with articulating what specific aspects of their organization need to change, how to prove that those aspects are indeed problematic, and how to truly align the organization around a clear and targeted plan of action. This presentation will discuss how to create a clear set of alliance organizational capability hypotheses and how to then test those in a way that results in a clear set of defined organizational barriers to effective alliance execution and a targeted organizational enhancement plan focused on enabling alliance execution across the organization.
5:15 End of Day
Day 3: Wednesday, May 6, 2015
8:00 Interactive Breakout Discussion Groups and Speed Networking
Grab a cup of coffee and delve deeper into some of the overarching concerns facing alliances today. These are moderated round tables with brainstorming and interactive problem solving, allowing conference participants from diverse backgrounds to have frank discussion while exchanging ideas, experiences, and developing future collaborations around a focused topic.
Table 5: Introducing Alliance Management in Newly Established Biotech Start-Ups
A larger percentage of alliance deals in the life sciences space involve a Big Pharma – Biotech partnership. This group will discuss creating collaborative innovation ecosystems from scratch.
What types of alliances should innovative enterprises form?
Which alliance management skills do companies need to possess and tools use?
What are the roles of different organizations in ecosystem?
How can organizations develop a culture of open innovation?
What are the ways to create value and share it among stakeholders involved?
Table 6: Overcoming Challenges of Companion Diagnostic Alliances
At some point most pharmaceutical companies look for a diagnostic partner. This group will discuss issues surround selecting a partner and avoiding challenges in managing these types of partnerships
How to manage development timeline and processes differences?
Who will pay for development?
What are the regulatory requirements that IVD manufacturers must meet?
How to navigate the requirements that must be met to receive reimbursement for companion diagnostics?
As the trend of biotech partnering continues, the need for practical solutions to address the often mismatch in capabilities between biotechs and larger firms has never been greater. The value of exploring these challenges also extends to pharma partners, providing insight into preemptively thwarting partnership perturbations. This session was created in response to round table discussion during the 2014 meeting, and explores these issues in tandem with attendee participation.
9:15 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
9:20 Strategic Alliances from the Little Guy’s Perspective
Doug Williams, Vice President, Alliance Management, Kadmon
Alliances between big pharma and start-up biotech companies can create unique cultural challenges that need to be acknowledged and actively managed by the Alliance Managers for each organization. Overcoming the cultural differences and understanding how to get things done with your alliance partner is critical to a successful partnership between start-ups and large pharma. Both the big pharma and start-ups can learn from each other and build on each other’s strengths to identify competitive advantages vs. the existing market.
9:50 PANEL DISCUSSION: Alliance Management & Project Management – Managing the Divide
Moderator:
Lena Frank, Executive Director, Program and Alliance Management, Eisai
Panelists:
Kristin Mulready, Director, Program Management, ImmunoGen, Inc.
David Parmelee, Ph.D., Senior Director, Program Leadership and Management, Biogen Idec
Doug Williams, Vice President, Alliance Management, Kadmon
Alliance Management (AM) and Project/Program management (PM) can be similar enough that many companies struggle to manage the divide between the functions, or debate if the two functions need to be separate. This panel will discuss their experience with tackling the issues of whether alliance management and project management should be treated separately or as a combined function, including the following topics:
• Benefits of separate functions versus single function
• Assigning roles and responsibilities
• Ensuring responsibilities of both functions managed adequately
10:50 Coffee Break in the Exhibit Hall
Academic and diagnostic partnerships are becoming of critical importance for driving innovative science through clinical trials. As these relationships increase, it is becoming clearer that typically the requirements of each partner do not mesh, causing dysfunction throughout the agreement. This session will explore perspectives from those navigating these partnerships to shed light on things to consider while looking for an academic or diagnostic partner, common issues to look out for, and lessons learned for success.
11:15 Lessons Learned from Non Pharma Partners
Teresa Faria, Ph.D., Senior Director, Alliance Management, External Scientific Affairs, Daiichi Sankyo, Inc.
The traditional Co-Development alliance model does not always work best when partnering with a non-pharma/biotech entity, such as an academic institution or a device company. This presentation will compare and contrast different types of alliances, discuss the challenges of non-pharma partnerships, what alliance management practices translate well, and what we sought to modify to address the different culture and business model of our non-pharma partners.
11:45 CASE STUDY: Companion Diagnostic Co-Development: Development of Novel Imaging-Based Companion Diagnostic
Susanta Sarkar, Ph.D., Director, Translational/Clinical Imaging, Sanofi Oncology
A number of antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) are currently in clinical trials driven by recent technological progress. However, most ADC targets are not universally expressed on a given tumor type and will require a companion diagnostic to select patients that are likely to benefit from the particular ADC. A non-invasive imaging-based companion diagnostic will allow real time measurement of antigen expression in the tumor, thus enabling patient stratification in real time by identifying patients who are likely to respond to the ADC. This presentation will discuss how a collaborative research between pharma and an academic institution is well suited for the development of novel imaging-based companion diagnostics.
12:15 pm Luncheon Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Lunch on Your Own
1:25 Chairperson’s Remarks
Jonathan Hughes, Partner, Vantage Partners
1:30 Maximizing Returns on Service & Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) Investments
Jonathan Hughes, Partner, Vantage Partners
Cindy Kearney, Former Vice President, Strategic Alliances, Research Pharmaceutical Services; Former Vice President, Global Pharma R&D, Outsourcing, Johnson and Johnson
During this session, we will share common best practices and pitfalls. Participants will learn about what specific practices and investments deliver the greatest value, and gain insights about how to enhance effectiveness in their own organizations.
3:00 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall
Undoubtedly, there is an ongoing and widespread shift in the thinking of what is truly required for continued delivery of novel medicines. As the interplay between early-stage stakeholders becomes more complex, the way forward requires not only managing the innate challenges of any partnership, but also the long term challenges of demonstrating and maintaining value of early-stage collaborative research as an integral business strategy. This session will focus on discussions providing a current and future look at the evolution of strategic partnerships, models for open innovation and academic-government-industry collaboration, as well as optimizing these partnerships for longer term business strategies.
3:25 Chairperson’s Remarks
Steven M. Ferguson, CLP, Deputy Director, Licensing &, Entrepreneurship, NIH Office of Technology Transfer
3:30 Planes, Trains and Automobiles: How an Open Global Multi-Stakeholder Model for Systemic Transformation Will Save the Pharmaceutical Industry
Greg Koski, President and CEO, Executive Office, ACRES (Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety)
Drug development depends upon an effective clinical trials process, and yet the current fragmented process is fraught with inefficiencies, poor performance, lengthy delays and skyrocketing costs. The process remains fundamentally unchanged for more than half a century and is characterized by many as unsustainable. Well-intended but disjointed efforts toward piecemeal approaches cannot achieve much needed systemic transformation--an open, non-profit multi-stakeholder alliance is now working to implement a global system to address these challenges.
4:00 Building an Innovation Ecosystem from Scratch – A Collaborative Network between Large Corporations, Small Companies, Government and Academic institutions
Yuri Khakhanov, Division Head, Skolkovo Innovation Center
By 2020 Skolkovo is intended to become world’s biggest innovation center as it brings together start-ups, science and technology companies, research and education, investors and entrepreneurs to boost collaborative innovation and commercialize new technologies in the high-tech hub near Moscow. I will highlight both the differences and similarities of working with partners from business, academia, government, and will show how to use alliance management principles to build successful relationships with partners in the ecosystem. The presentation discusses a new approach to create innovative ecosystem – common success factors; types of alliances between innovative enterprises, and public private partnerships; synergy achieved in clusters of high-tech biopharma companies; optimization of alliance relationships to provide maximum value to all partners.
4:30 PANEL DISCUSSION: Strategic Partnering with “Uncle Sam”
The US government is often overlooked by many businesses and organizations as a strategic partner in the health and life sciences sectors despite the many valuable roles that the government can play as funder, customer, technology source, research collaborator, open innovation partner and more that can add significant value to a business project or enterprise. This session will help guide you on how to best leverage relationships with your “Uncle Sam” for mutual benefit and showcase some interesting and rewarding examples of partnerships and alliances.
Panelists:
José M. Ochoa, Vice President Strategic Alliances, Emergent BioSolutions, Inc.
Steven M. Ferguson, CLP, Deputy Director, Licensing & Entrepreneurship, NIH Office of Technology Transfer
Eric Espeland, Ph.D., Chief, Vaccine Countermeasures, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), DHHS
Steven J. Ritter, Ph.D., J.D., Assistant General Counsel, Pfizer, Inc.
5:30 End of Conference