“If you’re a candle manufacturer and need to revolutionize global markets with a new product, if you ask your engineers to design the candle, they’ll never invent a soft bulb,” says Dr. Christian Tidona, founder and CEO. of the BioMed X Institute in Heidelberg.
To bring about genuine change, a more important question must be asked: for example, what if we simply used the force of electrical energy to generate light?And convene the brightest researchers, academics, and marketers to find the answers.
BioMed X is the strategic partner of a first-of-its-kind consortium designed to drive genuine renewal in the pharmaceutical industry by helping AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer and Teva find answers to more questions. not in Germany yet in Rehovot, Israel.
Founded in 2021 through 4 multinationals with Israel Biotech Fund and Amazon Web Services, AION Labs combines the expertise of the pharmaceutical industry with the ingenuity, agility and innovation intuition of the Israeli startup ecosystem to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry.
Flip
“Lately, the evolution of drugs is an expensive, inefficient and time-consuming process,” Tidona said at the recent MIXiii convention Health-Tech. IL in Jerusalem.
“If you look at first-class drugs like Copaxone, which is a wonderful achievement for the Weizmann Institute, Teva and Israel in general, it’s been 30 years from discovering the concept to a drug that will help patients,” Tidona said. “And the way innovation is done is still the way we did it 20, 30, 40 years ago. “
So far, most biotechnological inventions have come from academia.
“Teachers and scientists have a great idea and start building anything they are passionate about. And then, five years and $10 million later, they find that there’s no challenge they can solve with this solution, at least not that no one would pay, and it all fails,” Tidona said.
“Pharmaceutical corporations want to ‘pull down their pants’ and tell everyone their secrets, and then they get the innovation. “
“So we changed the scenario by inviting brilliant minds to submit programs that explain how they can solve [the demanding situations of the pharmaceutical industry]. We identify the most productive of the most productive, physically move them to our place and place them in an education camp. The winner has the opportunity to expand the platforms that will serve the entire industry.
Israel’s Candy Place
Tamara Mansfeld, senior director and leader of Pfizer’s virtual innovation and partnerships team, said Big Pharma understands that “we have to believe in another future” and that the AION Labs alliance is a promising way to achieve this.
“If we solve all the critical problems that obstruct new drug discovery, we can do it on a much larger scale than if we all did it separately. “
Pfizer, he noted, “recognized early on that the intersection between computer generation and finance is a sore point in Israel” and has been collaborating with the Israelis since 2015 to bring synthetic intelligence, herbal language processing and computational biology to the pharmaceutical industry.
“We knew that the things coming out of this area in Israel are unique,” Mansfeld said, noting that Israel brings “the spark of brilliance, which is what we needed. “
Pushing the barriers to innovation at AION Labs, he said, will require beyond known problems.
“Can we challenge ourselves to identify bigger problems, more complex problems, and can we challenge the ecosystem to bring back even more cutting-edge solutions?”
The Airbnb of the pharmaceutical industry?
By incubating a handful of startups organized in Rehovot, whether Israeli or foreign, Tidona believes AION Labs will facilitate another paradigm in the industry.
And he has a pretty radical concept of what that look looks like.
“What is the largest retail store in the world?Amazon. Amazon doesn’t have a lot of retail stores,” Tidona said.
“What is the largest hotel in the world?Airbnb. Airbnb does not own a hotel for singles.
“What is the largest taxi company in the world?Uber doesn’t have a single taxi,” Tidona continued.
“So the largest pharmaceutical corporation in 10 years does not own a single pharmaceutical product. “
AION Labs, CEO Mati Gill’s leadership, can facilitate such a radical change, Tidona said.
“We want to create a position where the most productive skill in the world needs to be. And we’re moving them here with their families to create local density and diversity, a local ecosystem that’s conducive to innovation, which means loss of ideas, no silos, cross-pollination, family collaboration,” he said.
“That’s what we do in Rehovot. “
“We’re on the boat”
Mansfeld agreed that successful collaborations lie in “a number of things that create the feeling of running toward a common goal. “
“Israel’s strength is the popularity across all partners that we are all in this together. “
Tidona recalled that an AstraZeneca executive looked at representatives of major pharmaceutical corporations on the first day of the AION Labs challenge presentation and commented, “Gee, it’s like we’re almost in the same company. “
“When all the pharmaceutical corporations get together, they want to ‘pull down their pants’ and tell everyone their secrets, and then you get the innovation,” Tidona said.
He said some of the stakeholders “are a little reluctant to move their families to Israel. So we all have to work to show other people that this is a great place to be artistic and raise a family. “