The Most Impactful Quotes From January

Every month, Pharmaceutical Executive speaks with a variety of experts and industry insiders. They provide commentary on current events, insight on trends, and detail the direction they expect the industry to go in the coming months.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What impact does patient-centered thinking have on development and commercialization?
Amy Grover, executive director of patient advocacy at Catalyst: Patient-centered thinking fundamentally shapes how we approach every aspect of bringing medicines to rare disease communities. In development, it influences critical decisions about clinical trial design, from choosing endpoints and sites to creating protocols that minimize burden on patients and families already dealing with significant disease challenges. Patient input helps us understand what outcomes matter most to those living with these conditions, which may differ from what researchers initially assume.

Patient focus should continue into the commercialization stage, ensuring our market access strategies, support programs, and educational initiatives truly serve patient needs rather than simply driving business metrics. For rare diseases specifically, where patient populations are small and often underserved, this approach is essential. It means designing patient services programs that address real barriers to treatment access, creating educational materials that speak to genuine information needs, and building relationships with patient advocacy organizations.

PE: Why is data visualization broken in biotech?
Sunitha Venkat, vice president of data services and insights at Conexus Solutions: Biotech is sitting on some of the richest data in healthcare, spanning discovery science, clinical trials, real-world evidence, and emerging commercial signals. The problem is not a lack of data, but how organizations experience it. Most teams still rely on static, fragmented views designed for a much simpler world of rows, columns, and summary charts, while the science itself has become deeply multidimensional.

Visualization is often treated as an afterthought, something applied at the end of an analysis rather than as part of the reasoning and decision process. Dashboards tend to present tables and filters rather than helping leaders understand trade-offs, risks, and what to do next. On top of that, data is siloed across clinical, medical, and commercial functions, so executives rarely see an integrated view of patient journeys, access barriers, and scientific signals in one place.

In a lean biotech environment with aggressive milestones, teams often accept reporting that is “good enough.” But those visuals can hide weak assumptions, missing context, or early warning signals. In that sense, data visualization in biotech is not just aesthetically broken; it is strategically broken.

PE: What unique struggles do patients with Huntington’s disease face?
Heather DeMyers, vice president of US innovative medicines marketing at Teva: HD is a hereditary brain disease caused by a mutation in one gene in a person’s DNA. This mutation affects an area deep in the brain that helps control movement, mood, and thinking. The condition can cause emotional changes like depression or irritability, cognitive changes like memory or concentration problems, and motor changes like involuntary body movements called chorea. While it’s not the only symptom of HD, chorea can have a significant impact on daily activities and progressively limit people’s lives, but early treatment of chorea can help HD patients stay independent longer.

PE: What AI trends did you see at the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference?
Angela Schwab, CEO of Trialynx: Good and bad. You see a lot of players coming into the market saying that they can do this or that, but they’re just a ChatGPT wrapper. It’s really hard for companies that are trying to select vendors.

They’re asking which ones have substance and which ones don’t. Which one meets all of the security protocols, as opposed to ones that just say that they do.

Selecting a vendor can be very complicated because there’s a lot of noise. It doesn’t matter what sector you look at; there’s a million people trying to raise funds and saying they can do these things.

What’s going to happen in the next year is that that stuff is going to get filtered out real fast. The companies that we’re seeing a lot of interest in are the platform plays. We’re seeing a lot of interest in platforms over one-point solutions.

How do you tackle this entire process? How do you streamline clinical trials from end-to-end? How do you work with other people to ensure digital data flow.

PE: How have recent technological advances impacted the development timeline?
Clay Siegall, president, CEO, & chairman at Immunome: We started working on putting together our modules before we had Phase III data. We knew from Phase II that we had an exceptional drug. Of course, you must run Phase III since it doesn’t always match Phase II.

In the case of Varegacestat, the Phase III data was very close to the Phase II data. It was exceptional data. We started assembling and working on the things we need to get a submission to FDA and to plan out our commercial team, packaging, delivery of the product, and working out the logistics.

PE: Why was there such an emphasis on data collection at the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference?
Ken Keller, head of global oncology and CEO of US operations at Daiichi Sankyo: For Daiichi Sankyo, 2026 is our most important year. In 2025, we shared topline, pivotal results for six different registrational trials. All six were positive, across three ADCs. We had three different pivotal trials with our flagship drug Enhurtu where we’re taking drug from later stages to early-stage breast cancer. The goal is improving the standard care and potentially even curing some patients.

This year, we will potentially launch five new indications across three ADCs in the US. This is something you dream of as an executive in a pharmaceutical company. Launching one is a year is a success, but to do it five times is very exciting.