Novartis Oncology became involved with this project since its inception. Very soon we realised that there are some fundamental challenges within the healthcare ecosystem that we can’t solve on our own as an organisation. But as a leader in the space of innovative medicines and speeding up access to patients for medicines we felt that this project warranted a call. Let me double-click into that and explain what I mean. We are now targeting therapies for blood cancers in a way which we never would have imagined before and in order to accelerate and speed up that access you have to ask yourself what is it we need to solve. So there’s more and more single arm trials that are coming to registration; they may have a comparator, they may not have a comparator. We are having smaller patient populations and we are being asked for data points which may be well into the future like overall survival. Now, how do you speed up the access, be efficient with your innovation, get the right label that works for the right population and then for it to be reimbursed and valued by the system that you’ve actually invested your science for patients that works, you have the right label from the regulator and now you don’t have restricted access but you have an access that is available for patients where it works?

So having that faced that challenge we realised, you know what, this isn’t a Novartis unique challenge and we very soon socialised that concept with a number of other EFPIA organisations involved in the HARMONY programme. Let me name a few: for example Celgene, our co-lead, they’re involved, Janssen, Bayer, Amgen, Menarini and Takeda. Soon we realised that fierce competitors in the space of haem malignancies all realised we couldn’t solve this equation on our own so why don’t we join forces. Now, this collaboration requires really, really disciplined leadership, it requires people to have enough humility to take people with you and collaborate on the journey and you’re all doing it with very, very specific self-interests in your own companies but there’s things that you have to partner on to solve in the wider ecosystem.

How have you managed working with your competitors towards a common goal?

Yes, it’s an interesting point. As I said, we’re fierce competitors in the space but respecting the following guiding principles. So, number one, even with differential contribution respecting the principles of partnership; putting the patient first in the centre of all your work plans. Number three, having enough humility to learn by doing; accepting that ambiguity will be part of the journey. Having very, very clear assigned roles and responsibilities and ensuring that that role and responsibility is shared with your co-public partner lead. Then being in the driving seat of a lead company one thing you very soon learn is that these types of public-private partnerships, these fundamental levers you need to solve at an ecosystem level, you have to really articulate the fact that you can’t solve this on your own. Then as soon as you demonstrate that you’re very quickly likely to build trust. As soon as you share the glory with people, share the ownership, you very soon realise that this type of programme can only succeed once you have a fundamental built trust with your partners and they don’t see you as a competitive threat but they see you as a partner to solving some of those challenges.