Industry partnerships are crucial for more than just funding. Collaborating with pharmaceutical companies provides translation-focused questions that guide the design of advanced cell models, ensuring they are predictive, scalable, and compatible with real-world development workflows.

The Trump administration's strategy for lowering drug prices involves creating credible threats to bring companies to the negotiating table. This forces concessions and removes excess profit without crippling the industry's vital R&D capabilities.

The common misconception is that market access teams just set prices. In reality, they are a complete business leadership team with diverse expertise in health economics, strategy, and outcomes research. They must understand the entire business environment to demonstrate a therapy's value and ensure its commercial success, operating far beyond a simple pricing role.

The imbalance between rising drug development costs and financially strained public health systems is unsustainable. Novo Nordisk's CEO believes this will inevitably lead to a global trend of increased patient cost-sharing through cash channels and high co-pays, moving beyond traditional insurance models.

Walgreens prioritizes tackling barriers to medication access—such as cost and prior authorizations—believing that adherence can only be addressed once a patient can consistently obtain their therapy. This frames the two issues as a sequence, not parallel challenges.

A centrist solution to high drug prices involves combining ideas from both political aisles. Oliver Libby suggests allowing Medicare to negotiate prices (a left-leaning idea) while also extending patent life for drug companies (a right-leaning idea), thus lowering costs without killing the incentive for innovation.

Applying traditional, broad primary care launch strategies to highly targeted specialty therapies is a major risk. The complexity of stakeholders and decision-making in areas like oncology means old playbooks can make a company's efforts completely irrelevant.

When patient engagement is owned by a single department, it's often treated as optional. To make it a core business driver, responsibility must be shared across R&D, medical, regulatory, and commercial teams. This requires a structural and cultural shift to become truly transformational for the organization.

The agreement between the Trump administration and pharma on Mounjaro/Ozempic pricing ratified a new "large market, medium price" benchmark. This fundamentally expands the industry's total addressable market beyond the old "small market, high price" model for rare diseases, suggesting a major long-term growth driver.