Business support for the healthcare and life science industry.

Good times for UK Life Science Surging energy prices, a cost-of-living crisis, looming stagflation and struggling stock markets: 2022’s financial headlines have seemed almost universally negative. Amidst all this gloom, it should not be forgotten that, in the UK, the life science sector is experiencing something of a boom. Figures recently released by the BioIndustry […]

The modern Pharma industry has long had issues around “reputation” and much of the criticism has often centred on drug pricing. Commercial organisations developing and selling life changing and life-saving products are held to a different standard to other companies. If a technology firm decides to launch their new smartphone at an exorbitant price, in […]

There is a growing agreement that the key issue facing the global drug industry over the coming years will be how to adapt to a digital landscape that is changing at an astonishing pace. Apple’s App store was launched a mere 10 years ago. By 2013 there were around 66,000 digital health Apps available in […]

Like most pharmaceutical companies established in the nineteenth century, Pfizer’s origins are as a fine chemicals company. Charles Pfizer and his cousin established “Charles Pfizer & Company, Manufacturing Chemists in New York in 1849 and by 1860 the company were making over a dozen chemicals for use in a range of industries including photography, food […]

Change happens quickly in China. On 12th April a Chinese student suffering from cancer posted an angry blog after paying around Rmb200,000 (~GBP20,000) for an (unsuccessful) experimental medical therapy. He found out about the drug after viewing a paid listing on Baidu and much of his anger was directed at the Chinese search engine company. […]

My twin girls are five now and for the past year or so, one of their favourite refrains has been “ask Google, Daddy”. They are at that stage when they are curious about everything. The cynicism of later childhood years has yet to creep in and each day is met with a barrage of whys, […]

The buzzword “Multichannel” has been thrown around in pharma marketing circles for a few years now and it has always irked me a little. What marketing isn’t multichannel? Exactly who are these brand managers that choose their one channel for the year and stick with it? “This year it’s just print ads for us!” “Nothing […]

There will probably come a time when many of us will routinely monitor, track and record an array of health metrics on a daily basis. Medicine may start to become an exercise in the manipulation of big data, where a rich record of diagnostic & lifestyle information harvested from smart devices dotted about our person […]

Pharmaceutical companies in the US, and elsewhere, have been nervously hovering around the fringes of social media for a number of years now, trying to figure out how to engage with a medium that has ensnared millions across the planet. The companies’ products are being endlessly discussed, by patients and doctors alike, in blogs and […]

Industrial strategy has been a key focus for David Cameron’s UK coalition government from day one. Almost the first words uttered by the new Prime Minister in his first major speech1 as leader (in Yorkshire at the end of May 2010) were “Can we inject new life into the private sector, so that enterprise can […]