pharmaceutical industry trends Archives

Sanofi offers a year of salary to employees facing cancer, critical illnesses

French pharma giant Sanofi launched a new global program aimed at providing financial, social and emotional assistance to employees diagnosed with cancer or other critical illnesses.

Dubbed “Cancer & Work: Acting Together,” the program guarantees continued salary and benefits for up to one year for affected staff regardless of role or location. It also incorporates flexible work options to help employees balance treatment with their responsibilities.

“The last thing you want to be thinking about when diagnosed with cancer is work,” said Natalie Bickford, Sanofi’s Chief People Officer, in a statement. “I am delighted that Sanofi has gone further, guaranteeing job security and salary continuation for at least a year after diagnosis.”

Program offers more than financial support

In addition to the financial safeguards, the program provides access to trained volunteer employees who have dealt with cancer themselves and can offer advice and support. Psychol…

In latest move, Biden targets 48 medications that have outpaced inflation

[Image courtesy of Biden for President]

In the latest move targeting Big Pharma, the Biden Administration has signaled its intent to target the pricing of dozens of prescription drugs. In a recently announced Fact Sheet, the Administration announced a strategy under the Inflation Reduction Act to focus on 48 Medicare Part B drugs that have raised prices faster than inflation. This initiative requires pharma firms to pay rebates to Medicare, which could translate to savings of $1 to $2,786 per dose for beneficiaries. The administration notest that it estimates more than 750,000 seniors to use the medications the act covers.

The Inflation Reduction Act is the backbone of Biden’s drug pricing policy, mandating rebates from pharma firms if their prices increase outpace inflation. The legislation also gives Medicare the ability to negotiate the price of a number of drugs. The law also includes a significant cap on o…

2024 forecast: Navigating new frontiers in pharma with AI, synthetic data, and strategic partnerships

[Adobe Stock]

In late 2022, we published a series of predictions, which, among other things, projected that 2023 would be a “massive showcase” for machine learning (ML) in drug discovery and development. And in many ways, 2023 was a pivotal year for AI in pharma. This evolution in AI and ML applications in pharma built upon the groundwork laid in 2022, a year in which the pharma sector embraced digital components, dynamic clinical trial designs, and advanced data science initiatives related to radiomics. Now, the ongoing focus on ML for processing large volumes of molecular, biochemical, and genomic data continues to lay the groundwork for innovation in 2024.

The predictions for 2024 further emphasize the importance of data, in both structured and unstructured formats, while also touching on a range of other themes related to everything from pharma partnerships with virtual care providers to the challenges and s…

White House targets blockbusters in Medicare’s price negotiation strategy

Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash

The Biden-Harris Administration has nominated 10 drugs for price negotiations directly with pharmaceutical giants after capping monthly insulin costs at $35.

Americans have historically paid more for prescription drugs than most other major economies. In a fact sheet, the White House highlighted that seniors paid $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs for these drugs just last year. Biden, like Trump before him, aim to bring prices more in line with those of other advanced nations.

This move is not isolated. The Biden Administration has implemented other cost-saving measures, such as reining in the cost of insulin and making some vaccines free for Medicare beneficiaries.

All of the 10 drugs on the list were blockbusters. Eight of the 10 were among the bestselling drugs of 2022. The remaining two are insulin formulations from Novo Nordisk: Fiasp and NovoLog.

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Visualizing automation’s influence on drug discovery careers

Today, the pharma sector, like many others, appears to be on the cusp of a transformation thanks to the influence of automation on drug discovery careers. Companies ranging from Insilico Medicine to Big Pharma firms like Janssen and Sanofi are putting AI at the heart of their operations. Many are increasingly recruiting workers from the tech sector.

Complex dynamics are at play amidst this shift. The integration of automation in the pharmaceutical industry is not simply a story of job loss and displacement. While 2023 will go down as notable year for layoffs in the sector, AI also promises to redefine existing jobs as create new ones as well.

An exploration of the influence of automation on drug discovery careers

To shed light on the varying susceptibility to automation of different job roles within the pharmaceutical industry, we created the stacked bar chart below that examines thirteen roles in the industry, each evaluated on fourteen different metrics that…