Julian Upton

This month at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Paris (September 9–13, 2022), AstraZeneca (AZ) presented new data supporting its ambition “to redefine cancer care.” A total of 15 approved and potential new medicines from AZ were featured across more than 75 abstracts in 13 tumour types, including results underscoring the efficacy and safety of Imfinzi, Tagrisso, and Lynparza across multiple cancers with high unmet need and data reinforcing Enhertu’s transformative potential in HER2-targetable cancers.

 sat down with with Greg Rossi, AZ’s senior vice president of oncology, Europe and Canada, to talk about these results, AZ’s other oncology activities, and his vision for the future of cancer treatment.

Pharma Commerce: What key changes have you seen over the course of your career in oncology, and particularly during your last 11 years at AZ?

 There have been huge advances. When I started 25 years ago, we were talking about how much chemotherapy could we deliver in what we called dose-dense chemotherapy, and how could we support those patients that we knew were going to receive toxicities. Now, we talk about really exquisite chemistry, really exquisite protein engineering, have a deep understanding of biology in terms of biomarkers, and are much more precise in thinking about patient selection. That’s manifested in things like immuno-oncology therapies, where we talk about harnessing the immune system to interact with tumors, or, for example, the antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) such as Enhertu that we have in our pipeline, which I think will be transformative medicines. These represent really intricate engineering work in terms of taking a cell surface protein and basically linking an antibody to it and looking at how you deliver chemotherapy at a dose that is unparalleled into the precise tumor cell. How do you make sure that everything dissociates in the right place at the right time, so that you’re killing the cancer cell but sparing the healthy tissue? A hundred years ago this was the stuff of Paul Ehrlich’s magic bullet, but now it’s a reality. I think it is the biggest transformation we’ve seen, and it’s not stopping there. Where will we go now with this technology we have at our fingertips?

Among these innovations, what have you been proudest to be associated with at AZ?

For me, LYNPARZA has been interwoven in my last 10 years, as it has with many people at AstraZeneca. First, the impact it’s having on patients—whether in ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, or breast cancer—is transformational. And this is complex biology; we were pioneering the science here. We were trying to understand which patients would respond best, how to best use the drug, at what dose, and what schedule. There are two studies in ovarian cancer, the SOLO1 study and the PAOLA-1 study, for which we just presented results at ESMO. The five-year follow-up of the PAOLA-1 Phase III trial showed that LYNPARZA plus bevacizumab meaningfully extended survival with 65.5% of homologous recombination deficiency (HRD)-positive patients surviving 5 years versus 48.4% treated with bevacizumab and placebo, doubling the rates of what you would’ve seen historically. The SOLO-1 Phase III trial demonstrated 67% of advanced ovarian cancer patients with BRCA mutations treated with Lynparza were alive at seven years vs. 47% on placebo. Ten or 15 years ago, that figure of 67% would have been more like 25%. So, that has been a very proud part of the last 10 years for me. And it shows that pioneering in a space is tough—it takes dedication, resilience, and a bit of humility. But when you succeed, you can really have an impact.

How has COVID-19 impacted AZ’s activities in the oncology space?

COVID has clearly had a very significant and negative impact on cancer patients on a number of levels. Firstly, there are the referral rates. I read a report recently saying that up to a million cancer patients went undiagnosed through the pandemic, with 10 million screening appointments missed. We know that diagnosing early is really important if we want to have the opportunity to cure patients. The impact of the pandemic is that more people will be diagnosed at a later stage and their outcomes will be poorer. But I’m proud of AstraZeneca, not just for its work on the COVID vaccine side, but for the effort and energy that the organization put into its oncology efforts during the pandemic. We worked with patient groups and the healthcare system to make sure this issue of timely referral was not forgotten. We supported campaigns in many markets to put the message out there. And we provided support for patients so they could be treated at home, with tools to help review symptoms and toxicities, for example. A lot of these ideas and practices have applications beyond the pandemic; some of the things we were able to do we’re going to apply more broadly going forward.


What kind of innovations are you advancing to help alleviate the health system burden?

First and foremost, AstraZeneca is focused on delivering really high impact medicines in oncology. We’ve delivered seven over the past few years; we hope to double that over the next few years. We have been very faithful to that concept of “the right patient at the right time with the right medicine.” This involves using biomarkers; making sure that health systems understand the potential value of diagnostic technologies and adopt these biomarkers; and making sure that patients are getting the most precise diagnosis that helps match their right treatment. We have positioned, as a central pillar of our oncology strategy, the concept of moving early, because that’s where we think the cure is most appropriate. That requires us to partner with a number of folks within the oncology ecosystem, not just health systems but also technology partners.

One company we’re working with, Grail, for example, has a multi-cancer detection test called the Galleri test that is very interesting and aligns very closely with our principles of being able to diagnose cancer early. And we’re continuing to innovate in diagnostics and medicines in the lung cancer space. There are lots of patients who are not diagnosed early enough with lung cancer. But they might come into the health system for a chest X-ray or something else. We actually saw this during COVID. People were coming in for chest X-rays and the new technologies were picking up potential cancer signals from those images. So, we are working with a couple of companies to take these radiographic images and scan them using AI technologies to identify the 1% of people with what we call incidental pulmonary nodules (IPNs), which could become cancerous, and then triage them into an early referral process. This is where new technology is really starting to make a difference.

We hear about patient-centricity a lot. What have you actually seen in your career in terms of the involvement patients in oncology?

Many companies talk about patient centricity and with very good intentions, but at AstraZeneca it’s a core theme in how we think about the way we develop and commercialize our medicines. But I think it is always worth questioning how we are implementing our plans, strategies, and engagement to validate that patient-centric approach. Actually, I would say there has been an increase in the way we’ve been thinking about that over the last few years. First, we now have a patient partnership program that is a part of how we design our trials. Patients and patient groups can basically come and talk to us about the impact of certain studies from the patient perspective. That’s been very influential. We are also working very closely with patient groups around the support, education, and awareness that they need to manage their disease, and also in terms of policy initiatives. In Europe we are involved with the European Union’s Beating Cancer Plan; that is now expanding to national cancer plans. Having a common purpose with patients, identifying patients appropriately, and promoting early diagnosis is an essential part of our work.

As I mentioned, our COVID learnings showed us how new technologies and tools can be really valuable in the routine care of patients. And we’re thinking more about things like equity and access to clinical trials for different underserved patient groups. What is the variation in access to care across the region and what can we do around that? These are the sorts of areas that have become central to our work more recently and that we are committed to engaging in further.

Can you outline what the next few years will look like in terms of AZ’s oncology efforts?

I think we’ve had a remarkable journey over the last 10 years. Much of what we have been doing has become more visible in the last five years, but it was initiated by CEO Pascal Soriot when he joined in 2012; he really provided the impetus, the pace, and the urgency to change. I’m very excited when I look toward the next 10 years in terms of what we have in our clinical pipeline, our technologies, and the philosophical approach we are taking to partnerships. We know that not all the science is done inside the walls of AstraZeneca, so it requires broad engagement and partnership, both on the science and patient sides.

In particular, our ideas around early diagnosis, precisely identifying patients, and harnessing a range of different technologies in combination to treat them are going to be transformative. Being able to do that in a way that delivers local solutions to physicians and patients around the world is going to take us, I think, to a leadership position in oncology.

Articles

AZ’s Greg Rossi talks about the company’s oncology activities and his vision for the future of cancer treatment

AstraZeneca: Redefining Cancer Care

Pharma Commerce: What has been the main impact of the last two years on Lundbeck’s supply chain activities?

Like many others we are seeing increasing costs and increasing lead times. There are a number of elements at play, not just the pandemic. Some of it relates to capacity issues in the industry and the increasing cost of raw materials, energy, freight, etc. But those are the main challenges we face: cost increases and longer lead times.

Among other things, the pandemic emphasized an over-reliance on raw materials and goods from India and China, for example. Was that something that affected Lundbeck seriously?

For several years we’ve done an annual business impact analysis, where we host workshops related to supplier risk and facility risk, looking into things that might occur at our production warehouse facilities. Based on scenario planning, we focus on the main risks in terms of potential impact and we formulate and implement mitigation strategies. These could involve dual sourcing, inventory management strategies, stronger relations with key suppliers, etc. So, we had been doing that, but then COVID came along and, subsequent to that, the high inflation that we’re seeing now. All this put extra pressure on us. I’d like to say that we’re in a better position to deal with it than if we’d done nothing, but to prepare for all this disruption was extremely difficult.

Some of the scarcity, for example, we had not predicted, even when COVID broke out. One of the things that we expected was the impact on glass for vials, etc., which did occur and which we were able to mitigate with our suppliers by planning ahead. But one of the things we did not expect was the shortage of filters for production, for example, and that hit the industry widely. Suddenly, everyone was fighting to get their filters up and running. We had to look at our portfolio and quickly take action on this.

Have you been further impacted on the supply chain side by the Russia–Ukraine war?

We don’t have direct supply from Russia or Ukraine, but we do have second- and third-tier suppliers there. That’s where it gets tricky in terms of trying to get visibility and understanding the dribble-down effects of the conflict. Our first- and second-tier suppliers obviously also start to look for alternatives as soon as they are hit by difficulties, but that puts pressure on the markets in other area. Again, it can be hard to predict the fallout from all this.

Has this period been the toughest in your career?

Certainly, the industry-wide impact has been profound and I could point to single incidents that for us as a company were extremely difficult to navigate. Everything has been hit: our fiscal supplies, our energy consumption, our ability to transport goods around, everything inbound and outbound.

We hear a lot of US-based companies talking about increasing domestic manufacturing and ushering in America-first type policies. Could you see this kind of thing happening more in Europe?

I want to say yes, but It’s a long journey. To fully internalize some of these supply chains is extremely difficult if not impossible. One element that has previously driven decision to source within Europe is regulations such as REACH, the European Union’s (EU) regulation on chemicals and their safe use. This requires companies to register any substances imported or manufactured in quantities of more than 1 metric ton per year with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The existing 30,000 substances produced or imported within the EU must be registered. However, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and excipients are exempt from registration, evaluation, and authorization if they are already registered with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) as an ingredient of a medicinal product for human or veterinary use. Lundbeck has made some progress here in terms of its excipient starting materials. Our API plants are in Europe and our suppliers are largely European based, which puts us in a good place in terms of our first-tier supplier base, however not the full supply chain.

What are your hopes and fears for the next 2–3 years in terms of managing the supply chain?

We’re going to be living with all these implications for a while. Getting costs down again is going to be a struggle for us all. And then there is the whole shift toward sustainability, which has been a consideration for some time but is definitely picking up speed now and adds to an already challenging environment. We want to balance sustainability initiatives with certainty of supply at a competitive cost, which is still very hard. Part of it will be driven by demand in society, but I’m sure we will also see further regulation, either by carrot or whip, in terms of pushing the industry toward sustainability goals.

How much is increased digitalization helping in terms of facilitating a more efficient and secure supply chain?

From a supply chain point of view, we can use digitalization to create transparency and also to analyze data and offer predictions and suggestions. There are definitely opportunities with digitalization that we can harvest. From a cost perspective, using data and advanced analytics also helps us to see what we can optimize, partly with our supplier base, but also internally. The difficult part is setting it all up. There is not a lot out there in terms of standards, so this digitalization is not something you can achieve overnight.

In this Q&A, Kristian Sibilitz, senior vice president, pharmaceutical production & supply chain at Lundbeck, outlines the impact of the last 2+ years on the Danish drugmaker’s supply chain activities

Lundbeck: A Supply Chain Perspective

Cognizant, a global IT company and provider of digital solutions for the health science and pharma industries, recently announced that it has signed a multi-year agreement with Organon, a global pharmaceutical company (originally formed through a spinoff by Merck) that focuses on women’s health and provides more than 60 medicines in areas including reproductive health, dermatology, and more. Through the agreement, Cognizant will help scale Organon’s healthcare business by delivering industrial technology support for Organon’s global pharmaceutical manufacturing sites. The partnership will work to:

Help improve the company’s delivery of healthcare products and crucial medicinal supply chain management

Increase real-time visibility of the manufacturing process and ensure pharmaceutical development continuity

Enhance supply chain oversight, increase medicinal yields, reduce cycle times and get products to patients faster.

To discuss the partnership and how the technology Cognizant is providing will help solve supply chain issues for Organon, 

 spoke to Surya Gummadi, Cognizant's SVP of global health sciences and SVP Americas.


Pharma Commerce: Why did Organon turn to Cognizant to improve its delivery of healthcare products and supply chain management?

 Cognizant will help scale Organon’s healthcare business by delivering full-stack industrial technology support for the company’s global pharmaceutical manufacturing sites in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Indonesia. 

This includes managing Organon’s manufacturing systems with SAP’s S/4 HANA enterprise application suite. Additionally, by providing remote and onsite support teams to increase real-time visibility of the manufacturing process and ensure pharmaceutical development continuity, Cognizant will help Organon enhance supply chain oversight, increase medicinal yields, reduce cycle times and get products to patients faster.

What will be Cognizant’s first steps in helping Organon toward its delivery and supply chain goals?

Cognizant will begin with two parallel workstreams.

We will provide support teams within those four major pharmaceutical manufacturing factories. This will provide local resources, who speak the local language, to support the shop floor manufacturing and lab systems.

In parallel, we will also stand up a remote team to support the global systems such as S/4 HANA.

How does Cognizant aim to increase real-time visibility of the manufacturing process and ensure development continuity?

For Organon, technology is a key pillar of differentiation in fulfilling the mission of becoming the world’s leading women’s health company. With local and global project teams, Cognizant will continue to enhance Organon’s connectivity journey—connecting local and global systems.

How will you enhance supply chain oversight?

Similarly, the continuing connectivity journey of connecting the shop floor systems to global systems such as S/4 HANA will provide near real time information about the supply chain and the progress of medicinal products through the manufacturing facilities.

What is the global reach of the partnership and where are the areas of priority?

The reach of the partnership is truly global, with its four major pharmaceutical manufacturing sites in Europe and Indonesia. The technology priorities focus on Organon’s manufacturing systems with SAP’s S/4 HANA enterprise application suite.

How will Cognizant work with Organon on the ground at different locations to achieve the partnership’s goals?

Growing local teams, with the right skills and the local language, will be critical to achieving the partnership goals. The blend of local and global teams to support the manufacturing systems will bring benefits in terms of quality and total cost of service.

We expect that the unique insights and understanding that will come from working inside the factory with Organon staff will drive a heightened level of overall service excellence and help Cognizant meet or exceed the goals of the partnership.

Surya Gummadi discusses the partnership between global IT company Cognizant and pharma company Organon, for which Cognizant is providing the technology to combat supply chain challenges

Cognizant and Organon: Speeding the Delivery of Women's Healthcare Products

The Health System Owned Specialty Pharmacy Alliance (HOSP) is a nationwide, member-led organization of leading health systems, which aims to be “the face and voice of the integrated specialty pharmacy industry.” It promotes the message that the fully integrated health system specialty pharmacy model is “the optimal way to improve patient outcomes while reducing the total cost of care.”

Recently, HOSP has led the way in embracing the new term “gold bagging.” “Bagging” refers to the physical packaging of a dispensed drug and how it is delivered to the care setting for administration to a patient. The other bagging terms are:

Clear bagging—when a health system’s own specialty pharmacy delivers medication to the clinic, hospital suite or provider office for administration to a patient

White bagging—when the medication from a pharmacy, typically an outside specialty pharmacy, is shipped directly to and administered at the hospital, physician’s office, or clinic.

Brown bagging—when a patient acquires drugs through their pharmacy and brings them to a hospital to have the product prepared and administered on-site. (This practice has typically been banned at hospitals and health system.)

The term gold bagging, however, “represents the most holistic, patient-centric, and best practice approach because it is a more controlled process within a health system with fewer potential failure points,” says HOSP. Under this method, the health system typically controls the purchase, receipt, preparation, and delivery to the point of care within its own closed environment. Gold bagging acknowledges and represents “the essential pharmacist-added value to the medication use and delivery process, ensuring safe, efficient, timely, and accurate drug administration.”

 sat down with Gary Kerr, president of HOSP and chief pharmacy officer at Baystate Health, to further explore gold bagging terminology and discuss why it is time for the concept to be more widely known .

Pharma Commerce: Can you tell us a bit more about what gold bagging means ?

 It is terminology more than it is an actual event or process. We at HOSP are using the word “gold” to most firmly emphasize how, in preparing the product for the patient, the health system owned pharmacy (HSSP) brings a series of value-added steps that would not occur if the product were simply shipped in from another vendor or supplier. Many HSSPs have teams of clinical pharmacists and they can and do access the electronic medical record (EMR), which outside companies cannot do for privacy reasons. So, if I, for example, as a health system clinical pharmacist, go into the EMR, I know that the patient’s clinician is also looking into it also, and he/she is going to see when my appointments are, what my lab values are, etc. Essentially, it’s a tremendous safety net to wrap around the process; our pharmacists communicate with our clinicians face to face and inside of our EMR and we’re continually making sure that things are good. And if they’re not good, we make sure that they are made good for the employee or for the patient. This could include medication adherence, disease monitoring, lab monitoring and side effects.

We’re circulating the term gold bagging to draw more attention to the extra value that is added when our staff is involved in the care of the patient. It’s like me saying that here in Western Massachusetts, when our pharmacy is involved, we’re taking care of our community patients with local and regionalized care. It’s not about a widget that’s coming from Dallas or from Fort Lauderdale; it’s a widget that’s purchased into our health system and enhanced with robust clinical pharmacy services. We double-check it, we control the delivery, the preparation, the lab monitoring, etc. And if the drug is to be infused in one of our infusion suites, we’re the ones doing the sterile mixing and the labeling and we’re talking with the nursing staff about how to administer it. These are all steps that would not necessarily happen with a product coming from outside.

You have mentioned that you’re confident that the terminology will become firmly established within five years…

That’s wishful thinking to a degree, but many of the health systems in the United States are being held more and more responsible for the patient experience as well as patient outcomes. HOSP recently published a White Paper which, among other things, compares the Net Promoter Scores (NPS) of integrated HSSPs with other specialty pharmacies. The specialty pharmacies have an overall NPS of 59, some a lot lower, while the HSSPs typically score in the 80s, indicating excellent customer satisfaction. This is the result of face-to-face communications with clinicians, patients, and caregivers; genuine human connections with commitments to follow-through; and a true high-touch, white-glove service throughout each patient interaction. These scores are an endorsement of the gold bagging concept, and our mission is now to elevate it. There are probably other organizations in the country that are comfortable with the clear bagging terminology, which is when the hospital buys the drug and dispenses it. We’re saying, yes, clear bagging implies transparency, we get that, but there is so much more going on behind the scenes that’s not reimbursed and is not acknowledged, which is why we want to push the terminology harder.

Do you envision any resistance to this terminology change idea, from payers or PBMs, for example?

The short answer is no, but we believe some organizations or pharmacy trade associations will be opposed to us disrupting the status quo terminology here. They are comfortable with clear bagging because they’ve been using the term for a while. They may say we’re going to confuse the marketplace by introducing a new term. I’d say to them however that we are simply trying to bring recognition to the power of our clinical care model, which patients are experiencing on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis. Many downstream implications within the industry could be hypothesized.

Can you outline some of the waste reduction advantages that the concept of gold bagging would bring?

Our ability to work within the EMR and see and communicate things that are happening in real time is something that the long-distance, third-party drug supplier would not be able to do. One of our pharmacists may be in the EMR, looking at labs and progress notes by physicians, and could say, wait a minute, we’re not going to dispense a $15,000 drug to somebody who clearly has an infection, or clearly has something wrong with their red blood cell count, or has been missing appointments. But another supplier would ship this drug, and once it leaves their loading dock, there’s not much that can be done with respect to returning it. But we can manage real-time dosing or regimen changes and we can manage the yes or no decision at the point the patient is supposed to be treated. In some instances the health system already owns the financial and medical risk within their contracts.

What brought HOSP to the gold bagging concept at this point in time?

It’s a sub-plot of the larger message we’ve been pushing out, really. Our commitment as a trade association is to get the word out about the value of what we’re doing, because otherwise it’s taken for granted and it’s not public. There may be drug access and payor network access implications. At HOSP we are all profoundly committed to improving/enhancing patient care. We are a bona fide group of pharmacy professionals in leadership roles that believe firmly and deeply in this powerful yet unrecognized process. We’ve all been spun around by COVID and its lingering and unprecedented financial and social impact on patients and communities. For us it is all about the power of the patient story—the patient experience and the patient outcomes—that’s what drives and informs everything we do.

The HOSP Alliance‘s Gary Kerr on adding another level of value to the packaging and delivery of dispensed drugs and modifying terminology


A Gold Standard for Patients

Vincent Colicchio, vice president of supply chain and external manufacturing at Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, reviews the key supply chain advances in the course of his career and reflects on the particular demands of the COVID pandemic.

Podcast is available directly on SoundCloud.

Podcasts

A look at the supply chain issues pertinent to the generics industry

Lowering Lead Times, Controlling Costs, Retaining Talent   

As a home or destination for life sciences companies, the Commonwealth of Virginia offers major talent, an advanced culture of innovation, logistical advantages, competitive costs, and a top-ranked business climate. Virginia's life sciences sector has gained significant momentum in recent years—with 20 life sciences industry projects announced in the past three years, representing over 1,400 jobs and $1.2 billion in investment. Recent announcements include US Pharmacopeia, AMPAC Fine Chemicals, Civica, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Bausch + Lomb, and Grenova.

Zooming in on Virginia's capital city and surrounding area, the Richmond Metro Statistical Area (MSA), Michael Ivey of the Greater Richmond Partnership points out that the MSA is just two hours away from Washington, D.C. but is “still rural enough for companies to be able to acquire several hundred acres for a large manufacturing plant.” The region is very pliable when it comes to the amount of acreage that a company may need, Ivey adds, “and you don't have to pay major metro prices.” Richmond is also “very accessible, whether you are approaching from I-95 along the Eastern Seaboard or whether you're using the Richmond Marine Terminal at the Port of Virginia, which is the third largest port in the US and has been named as one of the most efficient.”

Major hubs of research in Virginia include the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus (Ashburn), Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (Danville), and centers for medical research at the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Virginia Tech, and Hampton University. The VCU School of Medicine is one of the largest teaching hospitals on the East Coast, and VCU’s Center for Pharmaceutical Engineering and Sciences has established the only doctorate-level pharma manufacturing program in the US. In addition, Virginia Tech announced earlier this year that its Corporate Research Center is to expand flexible lab space for scientists “at every level.”

A key player in Virginia's economic development over the last 30 years has been the Virginia Biotechnology Research Partnership Authority (dba Activation Capital), an independent authority of the Commonwealth of Virginia whosemission is to grow life sciences and other advanced technology innovation by promoting scientific research, commercialization, business formation, and ecosystem development that “attracts and creates 21st-century jobs and companies.” Chandra Briggman was named President and CEO of Activation Capital in May 2020. She has spent 26 years working primarily in and around entrepreneurship and innovation. Before her current role, she was director of Venture Café Foundation in Cambridge, MA, responsible for the strategy and operations of the global network's flagship Venture Café Cambridge innovation hub.

 sat down with Chandra to review her first couple of years at Activation Capital and to discuss her long-term vision for the Richmond region.

Pharma Commerce: Can you tell us a bit about Activation Capital?

 The Virginia Biotechnology Research Partnership Authority (dba Activation Capital) was created nearly 30 years ago to help grow the number of businesses undergird by life science and other advanced technologies—typically described as scalable science and tech companies. This focus on life sciences resulted from the volume of research in the sector occurring at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) at the time. The coalition of VCU, the City of Richmond, and the Commerce and Trade department of the Commonwealth believed that this mission could be achieved by developing a biotech research park. So, the organization's first two decades focused on building the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park, known as the VA Bio+Tech Park. 

The park is a technology center dedicated to fostering the development of Virginia's life sciences and tech industries—though primarily life sciences—through technology transfer, new business formation, expansion of existing businesses, and business attraction. It's located on 34 acres in downtown Richmond, Virginia, adjacent to the VCU Medical Center. It houses the Bio+Tech Center, which is the headquarters for Activation Capital. Historically, this center has acted as an incubator for companies spinning out of VCU and needing wraparound services, support, mentorship, and startup funding. In the last eight to 10 years, the Activation Capital board has worked to expand the organization's purview, as over time, it had come to be viewed as just an operator of space. Today, it also engages in ecosystem development—connecting a mix of stakeholders and creating and scaling assets that work together to grow regional entrepreneurship. This includes identifying and nurturing industry clusters strategic to the growth of the regional economy.

You joined Activation Capital in 2020. What is your vision for the organization, and what steps have you taken toward achieving this?

Our vision is to cultivate and sustain a pipeline of globally impactful tech entrepreneurs in the region. Part of my strategy to achieve that vision is to evolve the park from a traditional research park model, which involves having companies and talent densely concentrated in a defined region but working singularly behind their own walls. Instead, open innovation and collaboration have become critical ingredients for accelerating innovation in any city or region. I envision connecting the stakeholders and assets within the park to hasten the pace of the breakthroughs across the innovation continuum from ideation to company scale-up. We're planning to expand the park. The first project is an Innovation Center that will address the acute need for lab space and concentrate fragmented commercialization and startup formation assets and activities in one place. This new space will focus on entrepreneur development and nurturing college and university spins-outs across the region. We are working with the City of Richmond through its Innovation District Plan to connect those companies and entrepreneurs in a live-work-play development in downtown Richmond.

Upon relocating to the region, when I studied Richmond at a very high level, I could see that all the right assets were here. The region needed a mechanism to tie those assets together to grow the impact of the ecosystem. If an organization is accustomed to operating independently and achieving success, it can be rather hard to break those practices and open the organization up to a truly collaborative approach. I saw this as an opportunity for Activation Capital. Another major strategy is growing connectivity within the entrepreneurial ecosystem across Greater Richmond-Petersburg, thereby nurturing a larger community of entrepreneurs based on unique regional assets. We were recently tasked by the regional economic development entity GO Virginia, with designing a cohesive entrepreneurship strategy for the MSA. That work will result in a 20-year vision and actionable plan for entrepreneurship growth.

Around the time I came on board, smart people were thinking about forming an advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing cluster leveraging existing assets in the region. The real work to develop a strategic plan for a cluster began to take shape soon after Virginia's Phlow Corp. signed its $354 million contract with the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to manufacture COVID-related medications and had partnered with Medicines for All Institute based at Virginia Commonwealth University's College of Engineering, generic drug company Civica and a custom manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients AMPAC. Regional stakeholders knew that such a significant win for the Greater Richmond-Petersburg region would need a broader ecosystem developed around those pioneering firms to sustain its success. So, under the leadership of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Engineering, a team of 34+ organizations, more than 100 people designed a multi-faceted strategy for the region, encompassing infrastructure, workforce, supply chain development, and innovation. That strategy was completed in March 2021. Activation Capital and a coalition of private-public entities from Greater Petersburg and Greater Richmond secured $2.5 million from GO Virginia to fast-track the development of this advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing and R&D hub. In organizing this “cluster accelerator,” called the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, we posited a value proposition focused on regionalism—we could achieve exponentially more if separate but complementary organizations worked together around one shared vision.

The pharma cluster coalition, the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, is one of the finalists

for the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge. Can you tell us more about that?

Yes, we entered the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, part of the US Economic Development Administration’s American Rescue Plan programs aiming to boost economic recovery from the pandemic and rebuild American communities. We have been chosen as one of the 60 finalists in the Challenge's first phase, and we're waiting for word on our progress in Phase 2. The winners receive seed grants ranging from $25 million to $100 million per region to support multi-faceted plans accelerating cluster growth, workforce development, global competitiveness, and equitable economic development. *

Our scale-up plan includes ensuring Petersburg's sewer and water infrastructure can best support the 200-acre manufacturing campus under construction by Phlow, AMPAC, and Civica; providing much-needed research and development lab capacity at the VA Bio+Tech Park; constructing a first-of-its-kind scale-up and development center for these new technologies—speeding their transition from benchtop to the factory; and developing a best-in-nation workforce training program through Virginia's community college network and anchor universities VCU and Virginia State University, and building a supply chain across the region.

It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the Greater Richmond and Petersburg region to raise the flag for Virginia life sciences. But whether we are one of the winners of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge or not, simply by applying to the program, we have gained more visibility around our thesis about leveraging existing assets and relationships here in Virginia. Consequently, many companies and entrepreneurs have reached out to become part of the Richmond-Petersburg region because it has proven that it is agile, mission-driven, and ready to scale to meet a timely and urgent need for the country.

On Sept. 2, The Virginia Biotechnology Research Partnership Authority's Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Cluster was announced as one of the 21 winners of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, to be awarded $52.9 million for its scale-up plan.

Chandra Briggman talks about her achievements and future plans as president and CEO of Activation Capital, which supports local and regional efforts to grow a high-growth entrepreneurship community in the Richmond, VA area