The profit of innovative drugs has entered the black barrier area, and foreign companies have started to eat executives back?

On April 1, Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals, an innovative anti-tumor and precision medicine company listed on the Hong Kong stock market, officially announced that Zhou You would be appointed as the general manager of Greater China and the head of the commercial department

The day before Zhouyou’s official announcement, a company called Jixing Pharmaceutical announced that Wu Kun was appointed as its chief commercial officer

On March 28, Pfizer China Oncology Division Wang Yiqin announced the appointment of Chu Nan as the head of the digestive/urinary/hematological oncology field

At the same time as this news was released, it was reminiscent of the news that Zhang Meng, the former vice president of Tencent Medical, joined Pfizer as the head of customer innovation.

On March 15, Zai Lab announced the appointment of Josh Smiley as Chief Operating Officer

On March 8, Merck officially announced that Cui Xiaoling, vice president of digital interaction and transformation, was transferred to chief data protection officer, and Zhang Ying, head of business operations, was transferred to chief transformation officer.

On March 1, Novartis Oncology announced the departure of Xia Shaofei, the current head of the blood business unit

In just a month or so, the changes in the executive positions of multinational pharmaceutical companies are equivalent to the changes in the industry in two years or more ten years ago.
There are also some trends behind these changes
.

First of all, facing the future, for talents, the boundaries between domestic and foreign companies are becoming more and more blurred
.
The main driving force for the flow of talents in the industry in the past was that the internal promotion space of talents from foreign companies was blocked.
At the same time, when talents returned to foreign companies, they were usually treated differently.
Talents who have been to domestic companies may be considered that their "taste" has changed and they are no longer favored by foreign companies
.
However, judging from the recent return of Qian Wei and Chu Nan to foreign companies, Luo Wanli taking the helm of Keixing Pharmaceutical and Josh Smiley joining Zai Lab, the boundaries between domestic and foreign companies are becoming increasingly blurred, both for talents and recruiters
.
Behind this trend is that the increasingly developed Chinese pharmaceutical companies are gradually entering the international stage and have the right to speak in the international talent market
.
In the future, high-end talents will no longer pay more attention to the nature of the enterprise, but to return to the essence of career development: whether there is better development space, attractive challenges and better rewards
.

Second, the flow of talents is normalized
.
By convention, foreign-funded pharmaceutical companies will not re-recruit resigned employees, or require employees to be re-hired after leaving the company for more than three years or more.
However, Qian Wei's return to Roche at the executive level within half a year will undoubtedly play a role in the industry's vane
.
At the same time, considering that Bian Xin, President of Roche Pharmaceuticals China, was the chief commercial officer of BeiGene not long ago, the culture of domestic companies without too many rules and restrictions on the employment >
.

Furthermore, the entire pharmaceutical industry is facing challenges in the digital-intelligence transformation
.
From Tencent Medical Vice President Zhang Meng "marrying" Pfizer to Merck's double-digit intellectual transformation-related vice presidents being suspended, to the resignation of AstraZeneca's vice president of digital and business innovation in July last year, Xu Jing The entire industry has encountered difficulties in the transformation of digital intelligence
.

Finally, the BioPharma and BioTech industries, which have experienced the continuous plunge of stock prices after many companies went public, still have strong vitality.
Companies such as Hessen Biopharmaceutical, Keixing Pharmaceutical, and Binuoji continue to emerge.
As a gathering place for talent flow, BioPharma, What happened to the BioTech industry?

There has always been a saying in the industry: the wave of innovative pharmaceutical companies that started around 2015 is like the "Thousands of Regiments" and "Thousands of Vehicles" that occurred in the Internet industry.
However, under the high-speed effect of the Internet, the battles of these new industries are often over within one to two years.
The R&D cycle of medicine is calculated in ten years, and the remodeling of the corresponding industry will take longer
.
The conclusion is that the above-mentioned innovative pharmaceutical companies are about to enter the final stage of industrial remodeling.
Even companies that have already been listed will be shuffled sooner or later if they do not have solid performance support
.

This statement does have its inherent rationality.
Around 2015, driven by capital, many foreign scientists, middle-level employees working in foreign headquarters of foreign pharmaceutical companies, and senior executives working in domestic headquarters of foreign pharmaceutical companies became the first wave.
The main force in the research and development of innovative drugs is typically Wang Xiaodong of BeiGene and Zang Jingwu of Tianjing Bio
.
However, in 2021, as the IPOs of innovative pharmaceutical companies listed on the Hong Kong stock market continue to break, the entire capital market has calmed down.
Many companies in the C round and D round of financing cannot raise money, and the pipeline that has been launched goes down each step.
They all need a lot of money.
If they can't continue in one breath, they will go to the end of bankruptcy or acquisition
.

However, it is unreasonable to compare the pharmaceutical market with a market size of several trillion yuan with the much smaller group purchases and shared bicycles
.
The research and development of new drugs is first and foremost a market with a large number of unmet needs.
In the fields of tumors, rare diseases and many other diseases, human beings do not have the ability to cure up to now.
In the field of chronic diseases where a large number of drugs already exist, better treatment methods are urgently needed.
R&D provides a huge potential market
.

At the same time, the research and development of new drugs can be divided into many dimensions.
The biggest challenge so far is the PD-1/PD-L1 and CAR-T cell therapy fields that have been crowded together in the past few years, while in many new fields such as mRNA vaccines, ADC antibodies There are still a lot of potential R&D opportunities in new technology fields such as conjugated drugs, gene editing therapy, stem cell therapy, and nucleic acid drugs.
Considering that some technologies are superimposed on different disease fields, the opportunities are even greater
.

In the foreseeable future, new companies will continue to emerge in the field of innovative drug research and development, and the emergence of these new companies will also create new employment opportunities
.
In the future, although practitioners in the pharmaceutical industry will face challenges, they will also have more opportunities
.

Text editor: Fan Xiaoyan

Format editor: Chen Lina